


between the jealous mountains (shall we mourn)

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [60]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Doom Gloom and a lot of other stuff, Feanor is out there burning up railroad ties like a crazy bish, Gen, It's now May it's been a year since Nerdanel was happy :(((, Lake Mithrim, going to keep it lowkey with tags for now, will add as we go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-01-20 15:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Vengeance is a long road--longer for some than others.





	1. Amrod

The long line of ants has formed a patient horseshoe around the toe of Amrod’s boot. They are large and reddish-brown.

“Like you,” Curufin would say, just before stuffing a handful down the back of Amrod’s shirt, or at least, that is what he would have said in Formenos, when the days were long and ants were the worst thing Amrod knew.

“ _And they heard wheels on the road_ ,” Amrod whispers, “ _and when they opened the gates, Mother was driving a wagon, and the wagon was full of clothes an’ food an’_ —”

“Amrod?”

Amrod nearly jumps out of his skin. No one has caught him at the Game, not even Amras, who stopped playing it months ago. If Amrod was smart, he’d stop saying it out loud, but it doesn’t seem real if it’s just in his mind.

Amrod needs it to be real.

Amras has not caught him, and Curufin is too busy following Athair around to be sly, and yet now Amrod has gone and hung himself out to dry, as Caranthir says, because Rumil, chief of the fort, has crept up on silent feet, and is watching him with a wrinkle in his brow.

“Nothing,” Amrod says, shuffling his feet and disrupting the ants. “I’m not doing nothing. Anything.” The correction is out of habit, even though Athair doesn’t care about that sort of thing anymore.

Rumil turns his head from side to side, as if he, too, is worried about being overheard. Rumil is cautious and quiet and not unkind. He answers their inquiries about the land, and the mountains, and how far away the ocean lies. Amrod has wanted to ask about the deep pocked scars that go all the way around Rumil’s neck, but he knows such questions are rude.

Maedhros has only one scar like that, and he hates it even though he pretends he does not.

Celegorm will not speak of it. Maglor is not even worth the trouble. Curufin says he finds it  _interesting_ , and that a woman did it.

Neither of the twins think this is convincing. Maedhros is tall—taller in his stocking feet than Athair in boots—and very strong. How could a woman bite him?

 _Women_   _have_   _their_   _ways_ , said Curufin darkly.

Today, Rumil’s collar is buttoned high, even though May has turned the days dry and hot and long.

“You miss your mother,” Rumil says quietly. Amrod goes as still as a frightened bird. If he had wings, he would stretch them out, each pinion stiff, ready for flight.

Rumil smiles. It is a sad smile. “Amrod,” he says. “It is no crime.”

He knows Amrod’s name. Most of the camp calls them  _Ambarussa_ , which began with Maedhros—or maybe with their cousins, Amrod is not sure. But Rumil is a mapmaker, and he is used to looking close.

“You...” Amrod stares back down at the ants. They are moving away from him. “You will not tell Athair?”

“Your father misses her too,” Rumil mutters. “When he spent a few months with me—you were still very small—”

“I remember,” Amrod interrupts, even though he doesn’t, really.

“He spoke of little else but his wife and sons.  _Seven, Rumil!_  he said to me _. I have been richly blessed_. He said he loved you more than anything.”

“Did he?” Athair has been too busy, too angry, too frightening of late to say such things. Amrod nearly forgot that he could.

“He did. And long ago, I met your mother, too.”

“She looks like Maedhros,” Amrod offers helpfully, in case Rumil is the one with a faulty memory.

“The same hair, yes.” Rumil smiles. “I did not know her well, but she was a strong woman.”

“She  _is_. She just—” Amrod cannot do this, cannot tell a near-stranger of the Bridge.

Except that they have been here almost six months, and Rumil is not really a stranger anymore. Athair is gone—in forge or mine or land beyond—almost every day, for he has been wild since the railroad came. The first ties were laid in mid-March. Amrod and Amras are not allowed to ride out with the others in the dead of night, carrying Athair’s fire-bombs, but they smell the smoke rising from the burned wood in the morning. They see the dark circles under their brothers’ eyes.

Rumil is not really a stranger anymore because Rumil and Athair have fought over these escapades, voices crashing behind the door of Rumil’s study.

Mostly, it is Athair’s voice that crashes.

“It is her birthday, this month,” Amrod admits. Those are words he did not mean to say—even beyond missing Mother, even beyond the distraction of the Game, he has not said this sort of thing aloud: something that insists on the idea of her, remaining.

“Indeed?” Rumil asks. He looks as though he is thinking hard, and as if his thoughts pain him. 

 

“The mail riders are in town,” Jem announces at the supper table that night. The conversation around her hushes, then resumes, as Rumil’s company and Athair’s men—Amrod still separates them thus in his mind—plan for any messages they have to send back east.

Amrod glances carefully at each of his brothers in turn. They are all quiet, shoveling down their food.

When the meat has been eaten to down the bones, despite being rangy venison, Rumil pulls Amrod aside. Amrod almost drops the stack of dishes he carries, but it would not matter if he did; they are all made of tin.

“Come to my study,” Rumil says. “Do it quietly.”

Amrod looks around. Athair is heading towards his forge, Curufin with him. Maedhros and Maglor are talking in low voices with Galway.

Amras, of course, is watching him.

“Can I bring my twin?” he asks, and Rumil nods.

 

It is strange to be in Rumil’s study without Athair and the others, knowing as they do what lies beneath the desk. Rumil swears that his men do not know about the mine, but Athair says the most likely traitor is a friend, and takes elaborate precautions to conceal his many journeys there. Amrod has stood sentry for long hours, as have the rest of his brothers, staring at the maps. He has crept around the halls of the fort, listening for any whispered rumors that might reveal curiosity in Athair’s doings.

This, too, is a source of Athair and Rumil’s quarrels.

“What do you want...sir?” Amras asks stiffly. Amrod worries, suddenly, that Rumil will bring up the Game, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lifts a sheaf of writing paper from his desk and two quill pens.

“You heard the news about the mail riders?”

They nod. Even— _before_ —they knew of the swift travelers who galloped through peril and storm to deliver letters all across the country. Celegorm was fascinated by such things. Perhaps, Amrod thinks, if Celegorm wasn’t an outlaw—if he wasn’t Athair’s son—

“I wondered," Rumil says, with another of his sorrowful smiles, “if you would like to write letters to your mother.”

Amras breathes a little funny. Amrod knows, and can feel it in his chest, because he’s breathing the same way.

They ask, together, “ _Really_?”

 

_Dear Mamaí,_

_I miss you very much. I have grown four inches. Amras has grown too, but I am a little taller, I think. We need new trousers very often. I wear an old pair of Maglor’s that I roll down at the waist._

There is so much to tell Mother. Amras looks over Amrod’s shoulder and says, “What are you telling her?”

“Don’t treat me like a baby,” he says scornfully, knocking elbows with his twin. “If I’m a baby, you’re one too.”

Amras subsides.

Amrod curves his arm protectively around the precious paper, and goes back to writing.

 

_We all miss you. The road was hard but it can be crossed, if you ever change your mind—_

 

Rumil seals the letters with wax and tucks them in his pocket. “I’ll bring these to town myself,” he says, “Before first light.”

Even Amrod knows that Rumil does not leave the compound. He has not done so since their arrival, just after Christmas, and from what the rumors say, he kept inside long before that.

“Will it…” Amras is the one who speaks up. “Will it be safe?”

Rumil’s smile no longer looks so sad, but Amrod cannot like it much all the same. “Your father has given me fearlessness,” he says. “Through the power of his hands. I will do this, for his sons.”

 

Rumil is gone when Amrod wakes, but half the company is out scouting or hunting, and Athair is in the mine—has been since the middle of the night, Caranthir whispers.

That means nobody but the twins know where Rumil is.

Having a giddy secret between them, Amrod thinks, is rather like the Game.

 

Fort Mithrim, as Athair instructed them to call it, is shaped like a long L, and in the cranny of the L is a courtyard where they practice sparring and stockpile wood for the forge. Winter here was so mild that they burned only a few logs in the great fireplace; mostly, the chill was countered by extra blankets, not extra fires. Athair’s forge devours wood, though, at an astonishing rate. He heats metal to white heat, and boils compounds that send foul stenches out into the air.

Maedhros is splitting wood in the courtyard, already sweating in the morning sun. Amrod feels _happy_ , as he has not felt since they sang at the border of the woods on Christmas Eve. Happy as he sometimes thinks none of his brothers shall ever be again.

He almost calls Maedhros’s name, almost calls him _Maitimo_ , for that is still and always the first name that springs to his lips. But Maedhros is not alone—one of Rumil’s company, a sandy-haired woman with a smile Amrod does not like at all, is lifting the knotty hunks of pine to set beneath his axe. As Amrod watches, Maedhros lifts the hem of his shirt to mop his face, and the woman strokes the palm of her hand against the bared marble-white plane of his stomach.

 _Women have their ways_ , Curufin says, in Amrod’s mind, as Maedhros startles back from her touch.

Amrod dislikes her even more, now.

Maedhros recovers, smiling smoothly, and he tugs at a strand of her hair, though Amrod notices that he pulls his shirt down firmly with his other hand.

“Feanorian!” shouts a voice from the door nearest Amrod, and they all turn, so that Amrod’s position is surely discovered.

The voice belongs to Jem. She strides out, her hat slapping against her shoulders with the ties choking at her neck like a noose.

“What is it?” Maedhros asks, stepping away from the woodblock. The woman sidles along next to him, and Jem glowers.

“Get gone, Nora. This is business. You can be a screw on your own clock.”

Nora stalks away.

“What is it?” Maedhros asks again, rubbing his fingers as if restoring blood to them.

Jem sees Amrod, he knows she does, but she says naught of it. “Mairon has returned,” she says tightly. “I came to tell Rumil, but he is not here. Have you seen him? I must speak to him—or—or to your father.”

Amrod remembers Mairon. Maedhros and Celegorm found him in the forest, and they brought him back to camp with his hands bound, but that did not keep him down. He had eyes like a cat’s eyes, and he wriggled out of his bonds like a cat righting itself from a fall, and he killed two men.

Amrod remembers.

“Amrod,” Maedhros says, when he and Jem are almost passing through the door. “Come inside.”

Amrod follows his brother.

 

He does not—

—he sees and listens, yes, but it is all out of order. Athair reappearing from the forge with soot streaked on his face, and Jem entering the trading post only to see Mairon waiting, his eyes on the door and on her. She ran.

Maedhros says, quietly, _you need not hate yourself for running_.

“Where is Rumil?” Athair demands, last of all, and Amrod and Amras are the only ones who _know_.

 

A horse walking on all four legs, dragging a man behind it, has a gait that looks like limping.

 

Rumil is not yet dead.

He was shot in the back, not by a gun but by an arrow. Athair is the one to remove it, and when he does so, he pinches the bloodied tip in his finger, revealing that something black and oozing sticks beneath the smear of red.

_Poison._

“He was not dragged far,” Jem says, balling up the bloodied shirt that they cut off him. In another time, in another world, someone would send the twins away, shielding their eyes.

Mother used to do that when one of their brothers was bloody, or on the rare occasion when someone had broken a bone.

Now, there is no one to stop them seeing. Amrod feels fingers brush against his palm, and takes Amras’s hand without even glancing down.

“Then that fiend is still near,” Athair growls, white to the lips. “Celegorm, find Galway and the others. Post them as sentries.”

“All due respect,” Jem says, gritting her teeth, “Our company has a few good shooting arms between us.”

“Then,” Athair snaps, “Send some of yours as well.”

Orders fly through the air and hit their marks. Amrod squeezes his brother’s fingers.

“Will he live?” Maedhros asks, in a low tone, and Athair answers, lifting the sleek gun from Rumil’s belt and staring at it as if it is a snake in his hands,

“I do not know.”

 

The camp healers—a native with dark braids and a man who speaks more Spanish than English—hover over Rumil, and at last Athair steps away, holding Rumil’s pack in his hand.

Amrod feels like he is swimming deep, beneath the weight of water. But what can he do? Snatch the pack away from Athair, and keep the letters hidden?

Athair finds them before he even decides what to do.

 

The door of Rumil’s study crashes shut behind them. Amrod cannot hide, cannot hold Amras’s hand, cannot hope that Athair’s wrath falls on his brothers, because Athair is angry at _him_. At _them_.

“ _What_ ,” Athair demands, his voice crackling like lightning spitting in the clouds, “Did you think you were doing?”

Amras is biting his lip. Amrod can feel it, because he is biting his lip too.

Athair moves quickly, and seizes them by their collars, one in each hand. “ _I expect an answer_.”

Maedhros makes a move, his hand outstretched, and Athair does not even look at him before he grinds out,

“Stay out of this, Nelyafinwe.”

“I can’t _breathe_ ,” Amrod whines, and Athair lets them go.

“They were just letters,” Amras mumbles. “Rumil asked…”

“ _Rumil_ is half-dead for following your fool errand,” Athair snaps. “A man’s life is laid on _your_ shoulders—and all because the pair of you cannot forget a woman who abandoned you!”

“Athair,” Maedhros says, very calmly, so calmly that it can mean nothing good, “They meant no harm, and Rumil chose—”

“Speak not to me of choices made!” Athair cries, and his wrath _is_ shifted from Amrod and Amras for the moment, but Amrod cannot be glad for it, though Maedhros carries it on his shoulders as readily as he carries everything else. “ _She_ will have much to answer for when she arrives. I will not waste our safety in attempting to hasten that day! And nor will any of you.”

“But it is her _birthday_ this month,” Amrod cries, before he can help himself, “And she is all alone!”

Athair’s hands clench at his sides. He does not reach for their collars again. He does not reach for anything.

“Run back east if you are so tied to her apron strings, you little _fools_ ,” he says, his voice strangely choked, and then he turns away from them and covers his face in his hands.

“ _Go_ ,” Maedhros mouths, and they all shuffle out, even Curufin, none of them looking at the twins. Amrod feels Maedhros’s hand, warm and steadying on the back of his neck, but he can take no comfort it in it.

 

“We should sleep,” Amras says, his face peaked in twilight. He pokes Amrod in the arm.

“I’m not tired,” Amrod answers. He wants to say, _I am not sleeping tonight_.

He cannot say that, not in the hearing of the others.

 

 _Run back east_.

 

It is after midnight, and he wakes Amras, elbow to ribs, hand over his twin’s mouth to muffle any noise.

Amrod says, “Come with me.”

“Come where?” Amras pouts, rubbing his eyes.

“We’re going to get those letters to mother.”

Amras lets out a choked little cry, and rolls over. “Don’t be stupid.”

 

_Run back—_

Mairon is out there, with his cat’s eyes. Mairon is near, and the _orcs_ that Athair says will as soon shoot them as breathe.

But Athair led them safely all the way here, all the way across the mountains. Amrod need only get to town, and find the mail-rider—and he is not Rumil, who has been hiding indoors all year, who must have the face of a wanted man.

Amrod has been hunting with Celegorm, has scouted with Galway and Maedhros. Amrod knows the secret of the mine, and can fire straight and steady with his right hand, and not at all badly with his left.

Amrod is neither a baby, nor a fool—he only knows the truth. The truth is that they need Mother. Athair needs her, so that he does not go mad, and Maedhros needs her, so that the light in his eyes can return.

Even Curufin needs her.

And Amrod?

All Amrod needs to do is send her a message.

 

It is well past midnight. He knows the sentry rounds. He knows which horses are out to pasture, with only Homer watching over them, from the edge of the fence.

No, Amrod is not tired at all.

 


	2. Amras

“ _I don’t want to look like him_ ,” Amras used to say, arms folded over his chest, when he was angry with his twin. “ _I was born first, I was_ here _first. It isn’t_ fair _—_ ”

“ _It is not about what it is fair_ ,” Mother said. “ _You grew together. I carried you both inside me, and then I carried you in my arms, and you are not the same, but you_ are _the same, Amras. God does not make mistakes._ ”

 

The bedroll beside him is empty, and cold.

 

Celegorm is the early riser, and Curufin too. Maedhros is up before dawn—only Maglor and Caranthir lie abed until the sounds of the fort rise loud enough around them that they have no choice but to join the day in its passing.

It is not yet dawn. Amras does not know why he wakes, now, with night still pressing on his eyelids. He cannot curl against Amrod. He…cannot know where Amrod is.

There are dreams and the awful fragments of things that are not dreams—Amrod lying stiff and strung, like Celegorm’s great bow, Amrod saying _Mother_ , and _come with me_.

 

_Don’t be stupid—_

Amras scrambles to his feet. He stands with the plodding walls, usually so stone-still, swaying about him like weeds waving at the bottom of a pond.

Amras _screams_.

 

Amrod lost teeth faster, sooner. Amras broke a bone first (his wrist). They were seven when they made their Communion, three years early, as did most of their brothers. They both prefer dogs to cats, to the disdain of cousin Artanis.

They— _are the same_ —

 

Maedhros is the first to reach him. He must suspect a nightmare as the cause of the commotion, for one of his arms circles around Amras’s shoulders, holding him so close that Amras can feel his brother’s heartbeat.

“What is it?” Maedhros asks. His hair brushes Amras’s in the dark, and it is not the same color, not quite, but it is so _close_.

 _He’s gone_ , is what Amras must say, the words he must use, for the last words he spoke were _don’t be stupid_ , and now he is terribly afraid.

He says nothing.

He points. Points, to the space where a brother should be.

 

“Amras says that he has gone after the mail rider,” Maedhros explains, and his arm is still around Amras, holding him as Maedhros no longer holds them— _him, is it just him, without Amrod in the fort?_ —in front of Athair. “I have sent Celegorm to see whether a horse was taken.”

“He is not such a fool as to…” Athair trails off, and he rakes his hands through his hair, which is flat on one side from sleep, and wild on the other. “He would not leave the safety of the fort.”

“He is fourteen,” Maedhros says, his voice dull. “He is a child.”

Athair pounds his fist on Rumil’s desk. They are in Rumil’s study, again, just as they were when Athair said those fateful words ( _run back_ ). They are in Rumil’s study, and the maps on the wall feel more like tombstones now, all different colors and kinds of writing. Amras is beginning to hate this place.

(Amras did not hold his twin’s hand then, and he does not hold it now, but the difference between the two moments is as wide as an ocean.)

“Were you a child,” Athair demands, “At fourteen?”

“No,” Maedhros answers. “But Athair—we must look for him.”

“Do you think I do not know—” Athair steadies himself. He tugs at his hair again, and then he crosses his arms over his chest. “I want your brothers. I’ll trust none but them. And find me Homer. It was he who swore to watch the horses.”

“One of the horses is gone,” Celegorm calls breathlessly, bursting through the door. “Homer heard it whinny—he suspected thieves, and called Alonzo and some of the others to gather the rest.”

“And he did not _follow_ it?”

“He thought it was not safe.” Celegorm’s jaw is clenched. His face is drained of blood, even beneath his dark tan. “W-with Mairon—”

“Arm yourselves,” Athair orders. “Maglor and Curufin also. We will ride down that fiend, and—”

“We have to find Amrod,” Maedhros urges. “He cannot have gone far. Amras, how long ago was it? Since he woke you—”

Amras would give anything to remember the moon’s position. The shape and length of the shadows. He remembers only the prod of Amrod’s elbow, and the warmth of Amrod’s hand on his mouth.

“I don’t know.”

“It was after we all went to bed, I am sure of it,” Maedhros says. He ducks his head. “I counted them, as always, but then—I fell asleep.”

“This is not to our purpose,” Athair snaps. “We must find Mairon, and kill him. His bloody tyranny has gone on long enough.” As if to dismiss any other possibility, Athair’s hand sweeps the air. “Amrod cannot have—would not have dared to—”

Maedhros’s hand is like a vice on Amras’s shoulder, and he shouts, “He left because _you fucking told him to._ ”

Amras has never heard him shout like that before, certainly not at Athair. And he has never seen Athair look quite like this, except when Mother told him that she would not come with them, and even then, Amras saw only the stiff spine and clenched hands.

He could not see Athair’s face, as he does now.

“We ride into town, then,” Athair says, his voice rough. Celegorm is standing by the door, and his breathing is like dry leaves rattling. “We find the cursed mail rider, and my son.”

Maedhros’s hand releases Amras, and he turns on his heel, setting out for the forge.

Celegorm follows.

This leaves Amras and Athair alone in the room.

 

“ _So perfect_ ,” Athair whispered, pinching them lightly on their cheeks, “ _That I made two of you_.”

(That was very long ago.)

 

“I want to go.” Amras knows he sounds like a baby, asking for it, but what else can he do? He has to find Amrod, so that he can be the first to speak to him, because the last words they exchanged were a question and an insult—two halves not belonging together at all.

“You cannot.” Athair’s trembling hands gather the papers on Rumil’s desk together as if to straighten and smooth them, but then he casts them aside. “Caranthir and you shall remain here.”

“Because you do not trust me?” Amras asks, high and shrill.

Athair’s eyes are like open wounds, for all that they are grey. “No,” he answers. “I do not trust you. Maedhros is right, Amras. You are children. You are, all of you, children.”

Amras has no screams left in his throat, and no words.

He will have to find them again, screams and words.

He will have to _find._

 

Curufin is proud to be chosen, though his eyes keep flickering to Amras, nervous and bright. Amras wonders what he sees, or if, for once, he is more concerned with what he doesn’t.

Curufin does love them. This is what they do not say.

 

Amras had a nightmare when he was eleven years old. He did not lose Amrod in it; he found him. His brother was broken into pieces, yet all the pieces still moved, as if someone had connected them with string.

When he called for Mother, she came, and Amrod cried along with his twin, because Amras told them both what he had dreamed.

 

With swift decision, Athair gathers weapons from the forge—guns and leaden balls that fit in the palm of one’s hand but that can cast fire a hundred yards. Maedhros and Maglor and Celegorm and Curufin array themselves in heavy leather vests, and tighten ammunition belts around their hips. Athair gives Maedhros and Celegorm throwing stars, too, for they are the best hands at darts and tomahawks.

Caranthir is picking at his shirt collar. He used to chew on it, when he was worried or indecisive, and Amrod used to tease him. “Athair,” Caranthir says, miserably, and Athair says,

“Do not argue, Caranthir. I need eyes and ears here, too.”

 _And someone to mind the baby_ , Amras thinks, and he feels as if his heart and lungs have turned to something black and dripping, something that could almost be called hatred, if it were not much nearer fear.

Homer, nursing a black eye imprinted in the shape of a fist that might be Athair’s or Celegorm’s, has been banished from guard duty, and so it is Galway who helps them tack and saddle their horses.

Caranthir and Amras watch from the gate of the fort. Athair and their brothers cross over the bridge, and Amras realizes that this is his family now—once it was nine, and then it was eight, and now only five ride away, in search of one and leaving two.

 

(She said, “ _I will not go with you_.”)

 

Caranthir’s hand on his arm does not feel like Maedhros’s. Caranthir is seventeen. Amras badly wants to say, “ _Athair thinks you are a child too._ ”

Again, he says nothing at all.

“Let’s go in,” Caranthir says. “We can’t do anything for them, but pray.”

 

(Family rosaries were dreaded, when such things mattered, or were dreaded as if they mattered. They knelt, all nine of them, upright in a circle. Athair led the first decade, and Mother the second, and then the rest were rotated, night to night, so that Athair could make certain that everyone knew their Irish properly. Everyone’s knees hurt, Amras thought. They _must_. The floor at Formenos was hard, even beneath the braided rug that great-aunt Lalwen made, before she became a nun.

Curufin was fond of kicking the ankles of those nearest him, in the hopes of eliciting a yelp, and Amras and Amrod much preferred the safety of the spot between Mother and Maedhros. But _that_ was also coveted by Caranthir, and Maglor, and sometimes wars broke out before Athair entered the room.)

(None of this is the point.)

(The point is, Mother made the rosaries herself, crafting each bead of glazed and fired clay in the color each son liked best.)

 

Caranthir pauses at the door of their sleeping quarters, and perhaps he sees that Amras jolts and halts a step too soon, or perhaps he doesn’t. Whichever it is, Caranthir says, gruff and kind as he can sometimes be, “Wait here.”

Amras does.

A moment later Caranthir returns, with his rosary and Amras’s in his hand. These are only two of the four that Amras is sure remain. He has not seen Maedhros’s in a long while, nor Celegorm’s, nor Curufin’s. But Maglor still has his sky-blue beads, and prays with them sometimes.

(They never pray together.)

 

“In the name of the Father,” Caranthir says—in English, and Amras wonders if that counts as rebellion—“and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

 

_“What do you think we’ll do when we’re old and married?”_

_“Married? Who’d marry you!”_

They stuck their tongues out at each other. Amrod poked his thumbs into his ears, too, and waggled his fingers like feathers.

 _“Jackanape._ ”

“ _Nitwit.”_

_“Anyway, d’you think we’ll still live together when we’re married?”_

_“I don’t know. D’you think we’ll marry twins?”_

There were twins who lived five miles away, girls with blonde braids. Their older sister Hetty made eyes at Maedhros. Sheep’s eyes, Mother said—muttered, really.

Curufin had said that sheep’s eyes were slick and globby and bigger than they looked. “ _All eyes are like that_ ,” he had said, grinning. “ _If you pull them out of the head._ ”

Amras shuddered, remembering that. “ _I don’t want to marry them._ ”

 

Athair’s guns can fire without rest or reloading, for more rounds than any other gun ever made. This did not save Rumil.

“They’ll come back,” Caranthir says. “All of them.”

“Don’t interrupt the prayers,” Amras mutters. “You’ll mix it up.”

 

They are sitting on a hard bench in the hallway, and they falter and go quiet whenever one of Rumil’s company or Athair’s men—Amras still separates them thus in his mind—passes. Galway alone tries to speak to them.

“Thought you lads might like to know that Master Rumil is settled resting, and his fever’s down,” he says. “We don’t know when he’ll wake up, but he’s not at death’s door just yet.”

“Thank you,” Caranthir says stiffly.

Amras will offer no thanks. He rears up from the bench, the beads crushed in his fist, and spits, “What do we care about Rumil? My brother is _missing_ —”

Galway does not scold or storm. He only looks rather sad and puffy-eyed beneath his beard, as if he has not gotten much sleep.

Amras, at least, slept soundly— _too_ soundly, when it mattered most.

“My brother is upset,” Caranthir says. It is not like Caranthir to be so polite. “Please…excuse us.”

“Of course,” Galway says, and without another word he walks away.

“Why’d you do that?” Caranthir whispers, his anger scalding over Amras, now that he isn’t holding it in. “Galway’s one of ours.”

“He’s not our family.” Amras squeezes his knuckles harder. He feels something crack. “I don’t care about him, or _stupid_ Homer, or—”

“If Athair doesn’t come back, they’re all we have.” Caranthir still speaks low, but the words sink in like bullets. “We need a place to stay, Amras. What’re we supposed to do if we don’t have a place to stay?”

Amras thinks of the man with the sick, almost-yellow eyes. He thinks of Amrod, and the letters he thought could save them.

Amras’s lungs have turned to black goo, and his palms are sweating. His palm _hurts_. He opens it, and there is a bead, fractured into little eggshell pieces—still pale green on the outside, but red clay within.

Red, too, is the streak of blood from where the broken edges scratched him.

 

Maedhros’s rosary was as dark as emeralds, Maglor’s was sky-blue. Celegorm’s was the color of Mother’s sunflowers, and Curufin’s was white. Caranthir’s is deep red.

Amrod’s rosary was the same as his twin’s; only the saint medals were different. Gabriel for one, Raphael the other. _My angels_ , Mother said. _My littlest angels._

 

“Oh, dear,” Caranthir says. “Oh, Amras, I didn’t mean—”

“You think they’re going to die?” He is whining, he is whining like a baby, and if Amrod were to see him, Amrod would say, _don’t be a baby, then I’m a baby too, we’re the same_ —

Amras starts crying. It begins somewhere deep in the goo, and then it won’t stop, because his lungs aren’t his own.

His lungs and his heart aren’t his own, aren’t _only_ his own.

(They belong to his twin.)

Caranthir sweeps the broken rosary out of his hands, and Caranthir puts his arms around him, and Caranthir is not Mother or Maedhros but he is something of a comfort all the same.

“They’re going to come back,” Caranthir mumbles, against Amras’s hair. He’s rubbing Amras’s back, and his hand is sticky with sweat, even through Amras’s shirt. Or maybe it’s Amras who is sweating. He doesn’t know. “They’re going to come back,” Caranthir says again. “I believe that.”

The trouble is, Amras doesn’t quite believe _him_.


	3. Curufin

Curufin did not know, until now, how much he would miss the weight of a loaded gun in his hands.

Of course, he has held what is essentially the same countless times since his kill. He has practiced his shot over plains and desert and mountains. He, like the rest of his brothers, keeps his weapon at his hip when they venture out to do Athair’s work under cover of darkness.

It is just that there is something altogether  _different_  about a gun loaded with bullets meant for men. Curufin is sure there will be blood tonight, blood as there was at Ulmo’s Bridge.

He expected panic.

He welcomes relief.

 

They leave Caranthir and Amras looking quite small by the broad door of Rumil’s fort.  

Amrod is—well, he  _is_  gone, but Curufin does not think he has gone far. Amrod is impetuous, and rather stupid, but that can only help them here. No doubt he has ridden a few miles down the road and then stopped to rest. They shall find his horse tethered to a branch, and Amrod fast asleep beneath the singing pine boughs. The twins have always loved sleeping.

 

(Amrod loves sleeping, but he stayed awake.

Hooves on the metal bridge are horribly loud. Why did none of them hear him as he rode? Even Huan did not howl.)

 

Athair leads, of course, and Curufin follows. Then Maglor, then Celegorm, with Huan loping behind him, and Maedhros bringing up the rear. Curufin watches Athair glance from side to side, and Curufin sets his mind to doing the same. There is a tall tree—Curufin cranes his neck.

His brother is not beneath it.

Still, Athair halts.

“What is it?” Maedhros asks, riding up beside him and dismounting also. Maedhros always tries to do everything Athair does.

“A rag,” Athair says, lifting it from the road and shaking out the dust. “I think he bound the horse’s hooves to muffle them.”

 _Clever_ , Curufin admits inwardly. If he was going to run away, he’d do the same.

Curufin would never run away.

Athair tucks the rag in his pocket and they ride on. It is almost an hour to the trading post—Curufin has been there but rarely, since they arrived at Fort Mithrim.

Even when months passed with no news of bloodthirsty Mairon, the hired orcs patrolled the town, looking for escaped slaves and wayward criminals. Gothmog the overseer was appointed head of construction in April, and even before then, news had reached the west of outlaw Feanor and his sons. Only Athair and Maedhros were displayed on wanted posters, so the rumors said, but Athair insisted on disguises for all of them.

Mostly, he insisted they stay within the fort.

 

Amrod and his bright hair, his eastern accent—Amrod’s folly is why they ride out tonight, not hiding their faces. Unafraid, because there is so much to fear.

 

Curufin loves Athair, riding proud at the head of their line. He loves him so wildly that his chest aches and his head swims. Athair will put his hands against the teeth of danger to save his sons.

Curufin has been permitted to come on their night rides, face hidden by a mask as are the faces of his brothers. Maedhros argued against it—damn him—but Athair shamed him to silence with a few remarks that Curufin could not quite overhear.

Those are nights that Curufin shall remember forever, no matter how many more pass in the same way—nights spent fending off the dull-headed orc sentries with fire-bomb diversions, then painting the new-laid ties with oil.

After, they set them ablaze. Since Gothmog’s arrival, they have had to be more cautious, because he keeps more guards, but Athair is cunning and his sons take after him.

 _Thwarting him_ , Athair said, meaning Bauglir. _He may lay it all across the country, but it shall have no terminus here, no completion. Let him fester in the futility of all his work._

There have been a few casualties, all orc soldiers, all dead at Maedhros’s hand. Maedhros has been their look-out, and like or not, Curufin must admit that there is no equal to his brother’s right arm. Once, when Curufin actually saw him take the shot, he barely had time to see Maedhros’s arm move before the man a hundred paces away was dead.

 

“On foot from here,” Athair says grimly, when they are shadowed by the last rough-handed trees that follow the road. They plunge into the shadows and tie off their mounts.

Athair chews his lip.

“Maglor,” he says. “Stay with the horses.”

Ordinarily, Curufin would expect Maglor to protest, claiming that he is the second-born, and should not be left behind on sentry duty.

But Maglor, in the half-rising light, looks pale and sick. He only nods.

Maedhros brushes his shoulder with a hand before they make for the main road. Of course. Maedhros and Maglor, separable only by death.

Curufin jerks his chin in Maglor’s direction, and then trails Athair and Celegorm.

Maedhros once more brings up the rear.

“Can you smell him, boy?” Celegorm is whispering to Huan. “Do you know where he went?”

At the word _smell_ , Huan lowers his nose to the ground obediently, but what can he find on a dusty road traversed by dozens of horses?

“He’s not a bloodhound,” Curufin points out.”

“I know,” Celegorm grumbles.

“Quiet,” Athair hisses, for they are coming very close to the eating-house, where the mail-rider was rumored to be staying for two days. That was what Curufin overheard at supper, a time that feels like ages ago.

“Be careful, both of you,” Maedhros murmurs, as if they need to be told that. As if Athair, putting his guns in their hands, leading them toward a beckoning rectangle of light and voices, is not proof enough that they are facing down danger and whatever else they may meet.

What is worse than danger?

_Fate._

 

“The soldiers ran him out of town,” the bartender says at last. His eyes are flitting, left to right, because no doubt he recognizes Athair and expects retribution of one kind or another to be swift. “Mairon’s orders.”

“So Mairon has returned.” Athair’s voice is like flame devouring a log, cracking the wood in two.

The man is frightened. Curufin can almost smell it on him, and Huan is tensed as if he does, too.

“He was here for supper,” the man says. “And stayed after. Didn’t have a room—sat in the corner as he likes to. Some men do that—stay ‘til breakfast.” He shifts on his feet. “The first batch starts in an hour. The miners leave early. Others come back late. That’s why we’re open round the clock.”

“And where,” Athair demands, “Is he now?”

Maedhros’s face is pinched. Curufin supposes that is because Maedhros would rather be looking for Amrod. But doesn’t he _see_ that the way to find Amrod is to make sure he is safe from any threats?

The bartender mulls over his answer so long that Curufin is sure they will step back out, not in the darkness of the wee hours of morning, but into rosy dawn.

“Gone hunting.”

Those are the man’s words, at last, and Curufin chokes on them.

 

“Stand where you are,” Athair orders. His coat rustles, and Curufin knows that beneath it, beneath the bar, his gun is drawn and aimed.

The bartender blanches. “I ain’t turned you over,” he says. “Alerted the regiment or anything. What do you—”

“So you know who I am?”

The man nods.”

“Good.” Athair smiles, thin and feral. “I have one more question, and if you do not forget it once you have answered it, I’ll see you first riddled with bullets, then fed in pieces to my hound. Understood?”

Another nod, rather paler. Curufin burns with pride.

Athair is an avenging angel, white and holy in the greasy gloom of this place. “My youngest son,” he says. “A lad with hair like his.” He points to Maedhros when he speaks, Maedhros who has not moved since they entered, except that his hand is also on his gun. “Have you seen him?”

“I…”

“ _Have you seen him._ ” Athair is not shouting, it is not safe to shout, but the words are a blow and they strike the bartender across his flat, unremarkable face.

“He came by after they’d chased the rider. I didn’t speak to him. He left quick enough. Saw the lay of things, I’ll reckon.”

 _Alive,_ Curufin thinks. _He’s alive, the little fool._

But—

“Was Mairon,” Athair asks, “here then?”

The man swears he doesn’t know.

 

Curufin used to try to frighten them.

It was only fair; Curufin was small for his age, and that meant Celegorm and Caranthir could shove him around if they liked (and they often liked). Maglor scolded, and as soon as Curufin knew what the word _patronizing_ meant, he also knew that that was what Maedhros was.

Why should he not taunt the twins? They were inquisitive and gullible all at once. He told them gruesome stories, challenged them to risky feats, and mocked them for being cowards if they shirked his pressing questions.

This is a story he could have told Amrod:

_You are alone in the woods, and a man who carves off faces is hunting you in the dark._

 

Athair leads them back to Maglor and the horses without saying a word. Maedhros’s shoulders are ramrod-straight beneath his coat, but if he has something to ask, some question poised like an arrow drawn against a bow, he does not voice it.

“Well?” Maglor sounds reedy and nervous. “Did you find the rider?”

“We ride to Utumno,” Athair announces, ignoring Maglor. “No doubt Amrod was taken there.”

A stunned silence falls. Utumno—the name of the neighboring county, and now of the railroad’s headquarters—is heavily guarded by Gothmog, his men, and the orcs. Athair’s destructive expeditions have been confined to the outer reaches of the railroad’s expansion. The closest they came to Utumno was when they burned the skeleton of a new station to the ground.

“Athair…” Maedhros begins, and Athair stirs like Huan does when he is vexed.

Not that Huan is vexed at the moment; he sits very still, with his ears pricked up.

“Have you some better plan, Maedhros?”

“We should follow Mairon,” Maedhros says. “We don’t—he is more likely to be tracking Amrod on his own.”

“You know him so well?”

Maedhros does not lower his chin, as Curufin expected him to. “I think he would not want to share—what he caught. If he—”

“And I say that we are wanted men, not for our supposed crimes but for the power we have shown in these past months,” Athair snaps. “Indeed, these past years. Bauglir fears me, Maedhros, lest you have forgotten. If they have taken Amrod, they will keep him close and offer him as an exchange.”

“Exchange?” Maglor asks, still quavering.

“In exchange for me,” Athair says, and Curufin has to agree. What else of value does there exist, to enemies such as Bauglir, but Athair and his genius?

“Then we should split our party,” Maedhros argues, because of course he would decide to be difficult at the most crucial moment. Curufin casts a withering glance in his direction, but how effective is that, when it is still almost dark? “Let me go after Mairon, Athair. I’ll take Celegorm and Huan and—”

“I have already said,” Athair cuts in, “That Mairon is going to Utumno. I’d stake my life on it. We would have tracked him first, had you not insisted on this diversion. But now we know. And we know that they need him _alive_ , Maedhros. The corpse of a child is good for nothing!”

Maedhros is so silent he might as well be holding his breath.

Curufin does not want to think of Amrod’s corpse. He looks instead to Celegorm, to see which plan Celegorm agrees with, but Celegorm and Huan both are staring at the ground.

“If there are no more objections to saving my son,” Athair says, his voice low but still very hard, “Let us be gone from here. Every second we waste hastens the worst.”

Curufin watches Maedhros. Watches how his fingers clench into fists, watches how a muscle in his throat—not the scarred side, for that is turned away—leaps and recedes. Maedhros is fighting, but he is fighting with himself.

That is always a losing battle.

Athair leads the way. Maedhros follows last, but he does follow.

 

It was all over letters to Mother. That’s why Amrod ran away, why he thought he couldn’t live in the world that Athair had built for them.

Curufin doesn’t—doesn’t _need_ like that.

They ride hard.

 

Athair and Maedhros and Maglor and Celegorm and Curufin. There are only five of them. There are ten men at the gates around Utumno’s headquarters. Pale light lines the sky and shows the fort in receding shadow. Curufin cranes his neck—where do they store all the ties? Where do they house the laborers? The place seems small and unoccupied, for such teeming purpose.

Athair, for his part, does not wait to inquire. He reaches into his saddlebag and casts something over the top of the gate. The ground shakes with a blast of fire.

There is a blur of fighting after that. Fighting, and calling for more reinforcements—and Curufin is aware of all this, _knows_ he should be paying attention to all of this, but he’s rather distracted by the way one of Athair’s bullets, in Curufin’s gun, laid waste to a man’s ribcage.

It’s his second kill. He wanted this, and he wants another, so that he isn’t the boy on the bridge anymore.

There, a shatter of skull. And there, a spurting throat, and Curufin has blood on his face, but it’s not his blood.

“ _Come out and face me!”_ Athair roars, and Curufin doesn’t know whom he calls. Is it Mairon, with his golden eyes and slashing speed, or Gothmog the overseer—or is it Bauglir Athair thinks he shall find, come west at last?

More orcs. More falling. Maglor and Celegorm (with Huan beside him) both have landed a few shots, and there is blood everywhere, the _smell_ of blood everywhere, and Maedhros is moving like the wind. Curufin can see it all in the glow of morning.

_How does this save Amrod?_

 

Curufin is shaking, and then he stops shaking. He keeps his eyes on Athair. Athair, who marches, relentless, towards the makeshift fort as if he would march _through_ it, splitting the walls by the force of his will alone.

Maedhros is covering for him, and Curufin springs over ground made spongy with blood—and _oh_ , that was not ground, but a man’s hand under his boot—to join him.

They have driven back the first wave.

“Athair,” Maedhros asks, in the almost-silence that follows. “What are we doing here?” He is as white as a ghost. There is no blood on _his_ face.

“Making a point,” Athair answers. Then he lifts his voice and cries, “Gothmog! Mairon! Come out, you sniveling whelps!”

No more men are coming. Athair turns. He looks—he looks _past_ Maedhros, and he looks at Curufin, and he says, “ _I’m going to save him_.”

Then Athair breaks down the door of the fort.

 

( _How?_ How _does this save Amrod?_ )

 

There are many ways this could have gone—perhaps none without bloodshed. Is Mairon a friend to the orcs? Does Bauglir know what his hands are doing?

Curufin cannot answer these questions without knowing more about Mairon, more about Bauglir, and he does not _want_ to know more but it has never been about _wanting_ , for him.

Here is the heart of Curufin’s need: it is a matter of discovery, and a matter of power, and a matter of becoming everything that Athair has fought his whole life to be.

 

Athair brought them here to prove a point (to someone) and to save Amrod (from someone), no matter how many lives were spent and how many more prices were laid on all their heads. Maedhros would have had them tracking hoofprints over dark and endless miles. How can Maedhros possibly have the better plan?

Curufin aims and fires, not as quickly as Maedhros. Maedhros turns to him when they are clear again, and his mouth wrenches, and he says,

“Curufin, _no_ —”

—and Curufin realizes that after _all this_ , after all they’ve done, Maedhros still wanted to believe him to be an innocent.

“Don’t _touch_ me,” Curufin snaps, when Maedhros’s hand stretches towards his shoulder. He can’t have pity, doesn’t want it, doesn’t _need_ it ( _doesn’t have that kind of need_ ). “Athair’s in there, and more are coming.”

“I never intended…” Maedhros is ill, behind the killing steadiness of his gun-arm. “Curufin, forgive me.”

“Are we not here,” Curufin hisses, “To save Amrod?”

 

( _But how?_ )

 

After, he will only ask himself why they let Athair go in alone.

 

Sounds of fighting reach their ears and Maedhros and Curufin move together, though they do nothing else together, and they pass through the broken door to find Athair surrounded.

“How many bullets,” Maedhros whispers.

“What?”

“How many bullets. In your gun.”

Curufin checks, lightning fast (or as close to lightning fast as he can). “Six.” There are more at his belt, but he takes his brother’s meaning. There will not be time to reload.

“Good enough.”

 

Curufin has a good memory. He remembers people’s weaknesses, and maybe that, too, is because he has always been small for his age. He remembers what hurts, what doesn’t, everything his father has ever said to him.

 

“I shall not ask again,” Athair is saying, as if he is not surrounded by a dozen men with Gothmog’s gun point-blank a yard away.

(Surely, Athair has a plan. Athair always has a plan.)

“You’re in no place to make terms,” Gothmog drawls. He shifts a pig-eyed glance in the direction of the door. “Even with the reinforcement of _your_ whelps.”

“You’re on orders to take me alive,” Athair spits. “You know it, and I know it. Therefore I consider you all unarmed. Where is Mairon?”

“Mairon? You came here looking for that slinker?” Gothmog reaches up—Curufin does not breathe—but it is only to push his hat back on his brow. “Ain’t seen him here in weeks.”

“You’re lying.”

“Be that as it may, he’s not here now.” Gothmog grins. “Why. Take something of yours?”

Maedhros has his gun up, but he waits.

Athair doesn’t.

 

Curufin hears the shot, but he’s too busy to follow it, too busy watching Athair’s hand fling upwards, the sleight of graceful fingers that once shaped metal and gems, that taught them all to fire a gun and to learn, willing or unwilling, how to practice scales on the piano.

Athair’s fireball lands in the rafters.

Gothmog’s bullet lands in Athair’s chest.


	4. Caranthir

_“Will you weave the May crown this year, Caranthir?”_

_Mother is only asking because Curufin refused to. Curufin has clever fingers, and his May crowns are works of beauty—he does not even strip the thorns from the roses, but turns them outward, gilding them until they gleam. He can thread the longest daisy chains, and quell the tube-like stems of tulips without tearing them. But at fifteen, he tilts his nose—Athair’s nose—and claims that he has grown too old for such nonsense._

_Caranthir is almost a year older than Curufin._

_Caranthir, when asked, says yes._

_May is the month of Mary, and also Mother’s birth-month, and also the month that Maedhros and Maglor come home from the city. The knowledge of that homecoming, in particular, has given Caranthir the fortitude to live with the rest of his family for the foregoing weeks of spring. He has listened patiently to Celegorm’s reports of young birds and sprouting saplings. He has helped Mother and the twins in the garden, digging long rows for seeds large and small. He has had nothing to do with Athair’s forge, but that is not expected of him._

_“We are so close to summer,” Mother says, and her smile breaks over her face like dawn. Like Maedhros’s smile._

_It is May, and Caranthir’s hand are bleeding from thorns he could not turn outwards, and yet he sucks on his fingers and is happy._

 

“You should get some sleep.”

For a moment, Caranthir is half-sure that he  _was_  sleeping. Amras, despite his protests, is snoring on his bedroll, and Caranthir is sitting up against the door to their quarters, watching the hall.

Except—he didn’t see Jem approach. Didn’t see her until he heard her, and now her boots are only a few inches from his.

“I’m not tired.”

“You mean you think we’re all set to be traitors.” Jem’s hair is usually slicked back, since she wears it as short as a man’s. Tonight, though, it is damp as if freshly washed, and Caranthir sees that it curls like the twins’.

He doesn’t know what to say in answer. It’s worse than with Galway. “I am not tired,” he repeats more firmly. 

Jem tucks back the corners of her lips in what might be a smile. “Maedhros is a wise man,” she says. “He’ll do the best he can.”

Caranthir is bewildered. “Athair is there,” he says, a little numbly, as life and loyalty have taught him.

“Aye,” Jem agrees. “But I assumed you trust your brother more. I do.”

Caranthir can say nothing to that, because it is true.

 

_“Lovely,” Mother says, turning the crown in her hands to admire it. It seems crooked to Caranthir. The peonies are wilting already, and the roses are missing a few petals. “It will be perfect for our statue. Thank you, Carnistir.”_

_That is the name by which she sometimes calls him._

_“Happy birthday, mamaí,” Caranthir says, flushing bright at her compliment. His cheeks_ will _redden, despite himself, despite his being sixteen._

 _“Shh,” Mother teases. “We must not celebrate_  that _today. Wait, until your brothers come home.”_

It does not matter, because Caranthir’s opinion does not matter, but he loves Maedhros as much as he loves Athair. Mother, he supposes, he loves most, but Mother is gone.

Caranthir guarded the room she fled from. He and Curufin were sparring on the floorboards when she climbed through the window and called for help. Athair raged at him for that. It was the only time it mattered that he was older than Curufin. 

“ _You_  let her go,” Athair snarled, shaking him by the shoulders so hard his teeth rattled, until Maedhros intervened. 

“He is only distressed over their disagreement,” Maedhros assured Caranthir softly, his arm around Caranthir’s shoulders, which  _would_  tremble still despite his efforts to steady them. Athair had crashed down the stairs without a backwards glance.

Hours later, Athair killed a man, and then another and another and another.

Maedhros killed many more than that, and yet—

 

 _I love you_ , Caranthir thought, then, and he thinks it now, directed at both of them, galloping off in the night. One for glory and one for kindness, that is how he loves them.

As for trust?

 

Athair laid Maedhros out with his fist over trust.

 

_“Wait, until your brothers come home.”_

 

Jem sighs a deep sigh and sits down opposite him, her arms slung around her propped-up knees. “I’ll keep watch for you,” she says. “And you can keep watch of me, very suspicious, so you won’t fall asleep.”

It is rather gracious of her not to add,  _again_.

 

Caranthir never minded being saddled with the twins. It stung a little that Maedhros seemed to love them best, after Maglor—but Maedhros loved everyone with such sun-gleamed fervor that Caranthir learned early not to be jealous. Celegorm, having never learned that, was doomed to spar with Fingon for Maedhros’s attention. Caranthir, taciturn and ungainly and ever trapped between being too quiet and too loud, was simply grateful for his moments in the light.

“ _You’re very good with them_ ,” Maedhros said, when the twins were still in cradles, and Caranthir stroked their downy heads gently, so that they did not even wake.

Caranthir was three, then, and though he likely has other memories from the haze of toddlerhood,  _that_  is the memory he chooses to name as his first.

 

“It’s a mean world,” Jem says, eerily calm. An hour has gone by, maybe more, and it will soon be morning. She’d offered to play jacks with him but Caranthir refused, hoping that he conveyed the appropriate degree of Feanorian scorn. “Most days I think I’ve lived too long in it.”

“How old are you?” Caranthir asks. He doesn’t care if it’s rude.

“Twenty-six.”

Older than Maedhros. “That’s not that old.”

“No, it’s not.” Jem blinks at him. Her eyes bore into his. “We’re not spies, Caranthir. I’m not a spy. I want your brothers to come back, too. And your father, even though I think he’s a fool.”

“You think Athair’s a fool?”

She shrugs. “I can say so. I’m loyal to Rumil, not Feanor. But you’re part of Fort Mithrim, now. None of us would see harm come to you. Or him.”

Caranthir digests this, and is almost grateful. Except that Amrod is gone.

Amrod is gone, because he couldn’t forget about Mother.

If Caranthir had half his innocence, or half his courage—he might have gone too.

He clears his throat. It’s scratchy, like he has been swallowing salt. “Tell me about Mairon,” he says. “You’re the one who saw him yesterday.”

Jem stares. Her knuckles tighten over each other. “It won’t help you to hear it,” she says.

“If I am the only one left,” Caranthir says—and even the thought of  _that_ , even the thought of  _not returning_  is enough to crush him to nothing—“I’ll need to know what I’m facing.”

 

Caranthir is not afraid of the dark. He’s afraid of everything.

He used to have nightmares, used to shiver away from Celegorm’s wriggling earthworms, used to run crying to Maedhros when thunder cracked overhead.

Fear is an old friend of his.

 

_Mother kneels next to Caranthir, and the twins are squabbling over who may have the honor of kneeling at her other side._

_“Memorare, O piissima Virgo Maria, a saeculo non esse auditum, quemquam ad tua currentem praesidia, tua implorantem auxilia, tua petentem suffragia, esse derelictum.”_

_(Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided.)_

_The twins are impatient; once they have placed the crown over Mary’s lapis mantle, they scatter to play. Caranthir stays a moment longer; he’ll stay as long as Mother does._

_“Caranthir, may I ask you something?”_

_She’s Mother. She can ask him anything. He nods._

_“Have I failed you?” she asks. She sounds—tentative, and that makes Caranthir hold his breath, for this is_ Mother.  _She is the most forthright person he knows, even though she is much quieter (much steadier) than Athair._

_“Failed…me?”_

_“You are sixteen.” She sighs. “We did not even—I know that we did not even ask you, if you desired to go to the city with your brothers. If you wanted something more than this life.”_

_Caranthir is not too young to remember the tremendous fight Mother and Athair had over whether Celegorm, at thirteen, would be permitted to follow in his elder brother’s footsteps. He wonders why Mother even bothers to raise it, as if it would do any good._

_And this life? This farm, these flowers, this open sky?_

_“I am happy here,” he says. “With you.” He only wants Maedhros and Maglor to come home, but he won’t say that, because he knows that Mother wants them here, too._

“Mairon is a killer.” Jem chews the corner of her lip as she says it, eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks. “That’s all he is. Oh, of course he wants power, and land. Maybe money, too. Most men do. But I don’t think anything brings him— _happiness_ , except blood running hot. The only way to stop him is to kill him. We haven’t managed that yet.”

“You’re right,” Caranthir mutters, after a pause. “That didn’t help at all.”

They’ve been here nearly five months. Caranthir doesn’t know who Mairon killed, but from the look on Jem’s face, it was someone she cared about.

“Rumil never trusted him,” Jem continues. It’s a story Amrod has heard before. “But sometimes all it takes is news of the East and a few promises.”

“That’s why my brother is gone,” Caranthir points out testily. “Because  _Rumil_  made a few promises about getting news to the east.”

That is only half the truth. The other half is Athair, his voice cracking like a whip, telling the twins to go home.

 _Run back east._  Those were Athair’s words, and this is Athair’s fault. The first shot fired was Athair’s, both before and after the Bridge. The errands that drove Maedhros and Celegorm into danger and darkness were Athair’s. It was even Athair who made Maedhros, white-faced and younger than Caranthir ever remembers seeing him, bare his throat like the scar marring it was a prize.

Caranthir’s eyes swim. If Jem was inclined to be cruel, she would have only to say, “ _Rumil is paying for his mistakes. What is your family prepared to pay for yours?_ ”

Jem is not cruel. She says nothing.

“Amrod’s smarter than he looks,” Caranthir whispers, all the fire gone. He hopes he doesn’t sound desperate, even if he sounds afraid. “It’ll take more than—than Mairon to get him.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Jem says. Like Caranthir, she isn’t a very good liar.

 

 _Holy Mary, Mother of God_ …

So Mairon is out there in the night, in the day, in the world. A killer who loves blood hunting down a boy who loves his mother.

It could have been Caranthir. Caranthir loves his mother.

But did only Amrod love her enough?

 _Pray for us sinners_ …

None of this is  _fair_. Life has never been about being fair, Mother used to say that, used to say that the twins, used to say it to Curufin—likely, she didn’t have to say it to Maedhros, who seemed to square up against injustice at the earliest possible opportunity, not trying to change it, just taking it on the chin.

But Caranthir?

_Now, and at the hour of our death._

Caranthir had a duty, and it was to his brothers. To the twins, because they were small, and foolish, and trusting.

A wise man might have foreseen that they will all die in the west. Maybe Maedhros knows.

 

Caranthir saw Mother at the Bridge. Just for a moment.

(It was enough.)

 

He swore not to trust Jem, so he swore he wouldnt sleep—but then maybe he  _does_  trust her, because he jerks back to wakefulness when she shakes his shoulder.

“They’ve returned,” she says. Her hair is dry, and there is sunshine rosy behind her, from the hall windows. “I hear hoofbeats on the bridge.”

Caranthir calls for Amras. This is, in the glass-sharp vision of hindsight, a foolish thing to do.

Together, the three of them—and there are more than three now, more running footsteps and clambering voices—charge out of the front gate. There are weapons, yes. Caranthir has his gun too.

They don’t need them.

He sees five horses and four riders—or at least what looks like four riders. There is Maglor, leading the charge, and there is Curufin—and even while his eyes are adjusting to the brightness Caranthir makes out Maedhros, his hair aflame in the far-cast gleam of ruddy dawn.

But where—

There is Athair. Athair and Celegorm together, Athair with Celegorm’s arm around his waist.

Athair with his eyes closed. Athair like a man who isn’t a man anymore, just a body, just a body with no trust and  _a fool_  and yet all of Caranthir’s love,  _all of it_ , he was wrong to believe that there was ever a time that he didn’t—

They make way. They make a path, and the horses are brought in and the gate after the bridge is closed and Maedhros is running to Celegorm’s side and taking Athair in his arms and Athair  _groans_.

 _Alive, then_ , Caranthir thinks, except it doesn’t feel rightly like his thought at all.  _Alive, then_ , like he had already resigned himself to Athair being—

“He’s losing blood.” Maedhros snaps the words like an order. Celegorm slips down from his mount and helps Maedhros help Athair. Curufin and Maglor are, very suddenly, there too. They look like ghosts: both grey. Both lost in a blur of lesser meaning.

Caranthir’s right hand has no feeling in it. He glances down and realizes that Amras is clenching it tightly in his own.

Amras. Amras alone.

(They did not save Amrod.)

Caranthir feels the heat of the crowd and cool kiss of the morning breeze and before his brothers have even come within twenty paces, he smells blood.

So much blood.  

He doesn’t even know how much of it is Athair’s.


	5. Celegorm

The roof of Utumno collapses in a roar and crackle of flame. Maglor is next to Celegorm—they were fighting back to back—and Maglor screams,

_Maedhros_

...as if Athair and Curufin are not beneath that roof too.

There is running, and a little more firing, but the few orcs that remain (that they have not killed, swift and sure and eternal, with Athair’s guns) are scattering.

From the warped doorway of the fort steps Maedhros. His coat flares behind him. There is soot on his face.

There is a body in his arms.

 _Curufin_ , is Celegorm’s first thought, hot as a bullet to the throat, but the body is too large to be his little brother. And there is Curufin, anyway, with his gun and another in his hands, screeching and swearing like the youngest madman Celegorm has ever seen.

So where is Athair?

Athair is not—the body is not—

(This is not his father.)

 “Help us!” Maedhros shouts hoarsely, and Celegorm runs, leaving himself open to a rain of gunfire that does not even come. (Most of them are dead.)

This is his father: black with soot, dark with blood, eyes still very grey.

“We have to get him out of here,” Maedhros says. “The horses. Get the fucking horses.” He sounds too much like Athair when he is upset—the Irish creeps in, and Celegorm trembles.

“Is he alive?” Maglor practically wails, and Maedhros barks,

“The horses! Now!”

Celegorm remembers where the horses are. Before their final march, Athair bade them tether the beasts in the shelter of a cleft-like ravine. Unless the orcs have found them, they will be there still.

“Curufin,” he shouts. “With me!”

But Curufin does not stir away from Athair’s side. Curufin is inches away from Athair’s hand, which dangles limp and pale beneath its lurid paint of blood.

Celegorm rounds his lips to whistle for Huan, but there is no breath in him. Here is Huan, though, his muzzle matted with mud and worse than mud. Dog goes with master as Celegorm runs through Utumno’s gates. Dog goes with master, as Celegorm can ever trust.

(They have often run like this, but at all the other times, Celegorm could breathe.)

The horses are where they left them. (Is everything where they left it? Could they return to the bridge to find their old selves waiting on the other side of it, with no bullets and no blows to their names? Would Mother be there, too, and Amrod, and Athair standing on his own feet?)

Celegorm chirrups to the horses. He leads Alexander by the bridle and the rest follow, even Athair’s great black steed, for they are well-trained. The orcs are dead; he and Maglor killed them. Maedhros and Curufin killed them.

And Athair—

Celegorm has the reins in one hand and his gun in the other. His throwing stars are spent. He could dig them out of the foreheads in which they are buried, but he has no time.

There is no time at all.

 

“Celegorm,” says Maedhros, “It has to be you.”

 

Celegorm mounts Athair’s horse, and then Maedhros and Maglor help Athair up in front of him. Athair is breathing, but his eyes are glazed and he does not speak.

“We have to put some distance behind us,” Maedhros says. “Then I’ll bind his wounds as best I can. Put pressure on his chest, Celegorm!”

(Maglor is not strong enough. Neither is Curufin, though he tries to argue. Maedhros needs his gun-arm free. It has to be Celegorm.)

 

_“My, my, Celegorm,” Grandfather Finwe says. “You are very tall and strong. How old are you? No, I am merely jesting. I know that you are twelve.”_

_“I shall be as tall as Athair someday,” Celegorm says proudly. He loves Grandfather Finwe very much. He loves the soft hair, now turning grey and white, and he loves the kindly smile and the big silversmith hands that Grandfather rests on his knees when he stoops to talk to the little ones._

_Celegorm is no longer a little one. He is growing up._

Celegorm twists the reins around his wrists, so that his hands may press against the hot slick of blood. Athair’s bones are still there, they do not—they do not  _move_ , they do not crumble. These are not the bones of the first man Celegorm killed.

Celegorm wants, more than anything, to have hope.

They are not pursued. They left the place burning, after all, orange and howling red. Celegorm didn’t see who lived or died within the fort.

“ _Maedhros_ ,” Athair mumbles, and Celegorm, shoulders and neck and arms tense and screaming with the weight and the worry, answers,

“No, Athair. It’s Celegorm. You’re—you’re safe now.”

How safe is that?  _How safe is that?_  Celegorm can barely hold him steady, much less still, as the road rises and falls beneath them.

And all the while, so much blood.

 

_“When your father was a boy—”_

_“Oh, but when Feanor was young—”_

_“The brightest lad I ever—”_

Athair was once a child. Celegorm can’t even imagine that, and he has never tried to. 

 

Maedhros pulls up short after a mile or so (there was a time when Celegorm mapped such things, and was rather skilled at it, but that matters not now). It is morning, and there is no darkness left to hide them, or any of this. Maedhros runs to Celegorm’s side and hooks his hands under Athair’s arms.

“Can you hear me?” His voice is high-wire taut. So much for Maedhros and his many lies. Celegorm wishes Maedhros could be calm, could smile with wicked charm and endless reason, could tell them that it was nothing but a scratch.

“Athair,” Maedhros tries again, as he staggers under Athair’s— _dead_ -weight, easing him to the ground. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Athair whispers, a word that Celegorm almost sees rather than hears.

Then he coughs blood.

“Pressure,” Maedhros orders, against the sound of Maglor sobbing wildly in the background, and Celegorm unfreezes to replace his stained, sticky hands against Athair’s chest.

Maedhros shucks off his coat, and then his shirt, which is stiff with sweat but better than nothing. His back gleams white in the piercing gold of the risen sun. Celegorm remembers a time when they would work side-by-side in the hayfield, Maedhros burning despite Athair’s protective herbal concoctions, while Celegorm turned brown as a berry almost at once. It has been long, now, since Maedhros stripped down without reluctance.

It has been long since anything was as it should be.

Celegorm takes the shirt and his own belt, and with the two he manages a makeshift bandage that he slings around Athair’s right arm and chest. The bullet entered on the right side. The heart beats on the left.

(This gives not as much hope as Celegorm wants.)

Maedhros shrugs his coat back on, and together, they lift Athair to his feet.

“A few more miles, Athair,” Maedhros says, his hands on Athair’s face, and Athair does not speak again. He shuts his eyes instead.

He still warm, Celegorm thinks, desperate. Warm—and warmth means life, even though that, too, is a lie, for Celegorm has put his hands into the hot bellies of dead things, gutting them before they stiffened and cooled.

If only he did not know what it was, to be a hunter!

 

It is the longest ride of Celegorm’s life, and the shortest.

Everything ends quickly when death—

( _Please. Not that. Not that. Not—_ )

 

Maedhros takes no shots. He doesn’t need to. They are alone, terribly and utterly alone, all the way back to Mithrim. All the way over the lonely bridge.

Athair made that bridge. Athair is a maker of metal and the maker of them, and he is so heavy and helpless against Celegorm.

 

_You are very tall and strong._

“Athair,” Celegorm whispers. “Are you—”

Breath and warmth. Breath, better than warmth.

But all the while, so much blood.

 

Many hands and voices move and pass, in the next heartbeat-run of time. Caranthir and Amras are waiting for them—half the occupants of Fort Mithrim are waiting for them. Celegorm scarcely remembers any of this. His mind goes flat and blank, as water does when a stone has sunk deep enough, and the next thing he knows, they are standing around a bed with Athair pale and cold upon it.

(Cold?) 

(No—it is only that his lips look blue.)

Celegorm is no savior. He cannot put a body together. He cannot _hold_ a body together. Were his hands not firm enough?

Or were his hands made for something else?

 

“Athair, Athair,” Curufin is chanting, over and over, and _that_ is familiar, _that_ Celegorm has heard since childhood. Curufin so single-minded, so pointed in his love, the most like Athair in look and being.

“What happened?” Athair asks, just as Celegorm is sure he will never speak again. “Where is—” his eyes fall on Amras, tucked close against Maedhros, and Athair brightens. “ _Amrod_ ,” he whispers. “We found him, then.”

Celegorm wishes, desperately, that he did not sound so _young_.

Amras opens his mouth, but he looks up at Maedhros as he does so, and very slightly, Maedhros shakes his head.

“Hello, Athair,” Amras says miserably, with a smile that he threatens to drown with tears.

 

They used to love to count Athair’s mistakes—calling Celegorm _Caranthir_ instead, or scrambling their ages, or confusing the twins. It happened so rarely, Celegorm could count the occasions on one hand. It was a prize to catch Athair in the wrong.

To know that he was human.

 

“No,” Athair breathes, frowning. He stirs, and it must pain him—stiffly, his body rises from the bed, spine arching, and he shudders violently as Maedhros and Curufin rush to grasp him by his arms, to hold him down.

“Athair, please,” Maedhros begs. “Lie still. Rest. You need to rest.”

“Where is Amrod?” Athair demands doggedly. “Where is he? We did not—”

“I will find him,” Maedhros says, solemn, and Celegorm thinks, _lies_ , but it would do not good to say that now. “I swear, Athair. I’ll find him. I won’t stop until I find him. You have to rest.”

For a moment, no one dares to draw breath. Athair’s eyes, shining hard, skitter over them as though it hurts to look at one son too long. Then he grinds his jaw shut, and frees his arms from Maedhros’s hold, from Curufin’s hold, and he lifts himself with a grimace that reminds Celegorm of nothing so much as a wild beast.

“Where are we going?” Athair asks, and his voice is hoarse, but it _rings_ , it still rings, as it once called them over fields, as it once ordered them to aim and fire, to never look back. “ _Where are we going?_ ”

Maedhros kneels to slip one arm under Athair’s shoulders, so that he need not hold up his own weight, weakened as he is.

Curufin gasps, agonized, and buries his head in the blankets, fingers groping at Athair’s right hand.

Maglor is holding Caranthir, and Amras, no longer at Maedhros's side, seeks comfort with them both. Celegorm stands alone, except for Huan, who is curled around his feet.

 

 _Sometimes,_ Mother says, in mind and memory, _God says it is time for a thing to die._

He has not heard Mother’s voice in his head for a long, long time.

 

“Where are we going?” Athair repeats, a third time. He slumps back in Maedhros’s embrace, and Curufin, not to be outdone, lifts his head, gazing long on Athair, keeping Athair’s hand clasped in both of his.

Maedhros’s shoulders shake, and his chin drops towards his chest, his hair falling in his face, brushing Athair’s cheek.

Athair blinks. “Nerdanel?”

Celegorm is not breathing. Does no one see that?

(No—how could they. How could they, when all is arranged exactly as fate intends it? Here is Maglor, holding together the brothers who still need him. Here is Athair, burned out, with Maedhros and Curufin, who love him best—which is to say that they are _best at loving him_ —close by his side.

And here is Celegorm, a loose end. Frayed and rope-rough and seeing no future, only the purpose of their past.)

“Nerdanel,” Athair says again. He sounds plaintive, and almost confused. “Where am I going?”

“ _Athair_ ,” Curufin cries. He is trembling like a leaf. “You are not going anywhere. Maedhros is right, Athair. You have to rest.”

“Rest?” Athair shakes his head. “All of you are—” A cough takes him, violent and horrible, and blood falls dark on the shoulder of Maedhros’s coat before it is over. When Athair speaks next, the words are frail. “All of you tell me this. But when have I listened to you?”

“Never,” Maedhros whispers, shaking his hair from his face, and Celegorm sees that he is smiling—the shadow of Mother’s smile, and his own. “But we want you, very much, to stay. And to stay…you must save your strength.”

Athair closes his eyes, and slowly, Maedhros lets him down, and there he lies, with Curufin’s breathing hitching along beside him.

“ _Oh_ ,” Athair sighs, long and low. “So soon? Not yet, Athair. I cannot come yet. I have—work. So much work.” He opens his eyes. “So many sons.”

Caranthir gulps a sob.

“The work will keep,” Maedhros promises softly. “Curufin can manage it all—he is the cleverest. Your cleverest. And we will make you want for nothing. We will be good sons, Athair.”

“Very good sons,” Maglor chokes. Maglor the wordsmith, who has said nothing until now, slobbering tears down his face instead.

Celegorm’s stomach turns. This should not be grief. Grief should be hot and swift, measured by the twist of a knife. This is—this is something else, something he cannot bear. He must move—Huan is looking up at him, all whiskered eyebrows and sad dog eyes, and Celegorm must _move_ , and _act_ , though a knife is not wanted here. He steps forward, and finds that his very bones protest.

“I—” And Athair must want to say _something_ , as the dying do, must want very much to _tell_ them all the rest of his many words, and Celegorm—

_Knows._

Athair is dying. Celegorm knew it already.

“He is dying,” Celegorm says, stupidly and loudly, and his brothers snap at him like wolves, whether they speak or not, whether they show their teeth or not.

“ _No!”_

 _That_ tears out of Curufin, harsh and scalding. But Athair takes his hand away, away from Curufin’s bruising hold (a hold that slips aside as soon as Athair wills it), and Athair says,

“He is right.”

It is so very quiet, now.

“Oh, God.” That is Maedhros, and it is thick with tears, even though Celegorm can see none on his cheeks.

“No,” Athair answers. He smiles, and _there_ is the smile that none of them have—some say it is Grandmother Miriel’s smile, or at least, that is what Grandfather Finwe told Celegorm once, outside of Athair’s hearing. It is gold and silver both, light on water, strong arms and a bracing voice that will always ring. Hammer on metal, metal warmed by touch. Celegorm is a hunter, Celegorm is barely his father’s son, Celegorm is—

—only that. Only Feanor’s son, here and now and watching him die.  

“No,” Athair says, stronger because he is ending. Brighter because he is fading. “There is no God here. I left Him.” His eyes flutter for a moment, and are once more steady. “We left him. But you are here, my sons. You are here. That is where you are going.”

“Don’t go,” Curufin whispers, ragged as a wound. “Can’t be—can’t be _here_ without—Athair, I don’t want to go. Don’t go. _Please_ don’t go.”

Celegorm’s bones stir. He moves, and Huan moves with him, and he kneels next to Curufin and wraps his arms around Curufin’s waist.

(Because Curufin is not dying. Curufin can be saved.)

“It was all for you,” Athair says. He lifts his fingers, and he beckons them, and they all draw towards him, like moths to flame. Only, Celegorm is already near him, because he is with Curufin, as Athair would surely want.

Maedhros is, perhaps, the closest, with Athair’s head pillowed on his arm, and his hair brushing Athair’s brow as he leans down to press his lips against it.

“I love you,” Maedhros murmurs. Maedhros has said that to Athair and the rest of them a thousand times; Maedhros is free with his love. It will be the death of him, is Celegorm’s first fleeting thought—though Celegorm is not sure that love was the death of Athair.

(Was?)

(Of course. _Was._ Celegorm is a hunter. Celegorm knows.)

“Don’t go,” Curufin keens, sharp and insistent, a smaller hammer on brittle steel, still thin enough to break. Celegorm can feel it in his chest, for he is holding him tightly, as tightly as he clung to Athair on the back of Athair’s horse. No one else speaks, now, but for Curufin, who was freer with Athair than any of them. “Don’t go, Athair. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. I don’t want you to leave me.”

Celegorm is watching Athair’s smile. If Celegorm shuts his eyes, Athair will be gone.

Celegorm does not shut his eyes.

The smile remains, but—

( _Was_.)

Curufin _wails_ , and after the cry leaves him, his mouth is gaping still, hollowed of air and sound both. He rocks and his fists rock with him, pounding Celegorm’s shoulders, but Celegorm does not let him go.

Celegorm is not weeping. He is dry and calm, he is mute like Huan is mute, he is something that is less than human, just as Athair was _more_.

All the light is gone from Athair’s eyes and all the strength is gone from Maedhros. Maedhros’s hair fans bright against Athair’s pale cheek (cold, no doubt, as dead things are always cold), and Maedhros sobs, great heaving sobs that sound like dying, too.

Maedhros knelt weeping by Grandfather Finwe’s grave, once, and Celegorm thought _that is grief_ , and maybe he was right—

(But this is something else, and he cannot bear it.)


	6. Maglor

Stories are only written so that someone may one day tell them, and songs are only composed so that someone may one day sing them. In Maglor’s mind, too, sacrifice and study both were employed in the business of being Athair’s son, so that Athair might someday love him with neither question nor restraint.

Death, in its doing, takes a terribly long time. Maglor remembers Fingon’s horrified explanations of coagulated blood and limbs cracking stiff with rigor mortis, and Maglor gazes on his grey-faced father and thinks, _duty, with no end in sight_. They must stay here until Athair looks in every way like a corpse.

Then Maedhros staggers to his feet.

They turn to him—all of them but Curufin, who is shaking still and staring at Athair with eyes as round as silver dollars. Maedhros is all they have now, Maglor thinks, too racked by exhaustion to be truly wild.

 _All I have. All_ I _have._

_“What if we hate it here?” Maglor asks, his voice echoing in the big room. The walls are painted icy blue—nothing like the soft cream and dark beams of their bedroom at home. Indis—Indis who is not their grandmother—told them that they could be separate, if they wished, but Maedhros assured her that it was no trouble for them to share their quarters while they stayed in Grandfather Finwe’s house._

_“You won’t hate it here,” Maedhros answers. His voice is light with confidence but his eyes are shifting left to right, left to right. They are sitting on beds that are too soft, and the coverlet feels smooth and cold under Maglor’s hands._

_“How do you know?”_

_“Because you were meant to show your music to the world.” Maedhros is only fifteen, but sometimes he is nearly as eloquent as Athair. “Everyone will love you, Maglor.”_

_“I don’t know,” Maglor mumbles, and if Athair was here he would chide, first for the mumbling and second for the uncertainty._

_Athair is not here._

_Maedhros is all Maglor has._

Maglor nearly asks, _where are you going_ , but those words are too close to Athair’s words and Athair is—dead, very dead, always dead. Maglor’s tongue thickens in his mouth, between his teeth, as if to prevent him from speaking them anew. Instead, he manages at last,

“Maedhros?”

(Just his name.)

“I must go,” Maedhros says, like a man dreaming. “I—” He is still wearing his coat with no shirt beneath it, and his chest rises and falls with unsteady breath. If Maglor were close enough—if Maglor could move, or think, without the terrible salt-stiffness of his eyes and cheeks and lips—he would no doubt be able to see the pulse battering beneath his brother’s ribs.

( _All I have_.)

With Maedhros going, Maglor could stay or go himself. There is no—no _purpose_ , no hope of a change, in this room.

(Athair is always going to be dead.)

He disentangles himself from Caranthir’s vice-like arms and follows Maedhros out.

(It hurts, more, when it is just the two of them, because Maglor always _wants_ it to be the two of them—only, selfishly, he demands that there be always seven more behind them, ready and waiting.

Mother they left and Amrod they lost and Athair…Athair they are watching go cold.)

 

_We have all swallowed blood and believed it holy_

_All run aground with our secrets only_

_Cast like stars above_

_Ruined like our love_

_“Maglor, you have a way with words. Perhaps God meant to give your voice to an angel, and then decided it was better-suited to my son.”_

_“Do you think so?” Maglor asks, and that is always the trouble, he always has to ask again._

_Even then, Athair and Maedhros called it nagging._

_Really, he just wanted to be sure._

 

“Where are you going?” Maglor has no words, no beautiful poetry, no agonized scrawls, nothing but bile and rage, because he _killed_ men today, more men than he could count—

(No. Six. He killed six.)

He killed six men and one father, and that is the rest of history in the hack of an anguished breath.

There is no one waiting in the hall. There are voices drifting and Maglor cares not whose voices there are. “So help me,” Maglor snaps, thin and shrill, “If you are going to _drink_ —”

Maedhros wheels on him, and his hands, steel-strong, grip Maglor’s wrists painfully tight, linking their arms like a bridge between them.

“I gave him my word,” Maedhros says. His eyes are flat and hard. “Amrod is still out there.”

Maglor is many things, and most of them are drowning in shame.

 

_“We have a request for you,” Mother says, very gravely, but her dimples are showing, and Maglor smiles back. Amrod—or is it Amras? Maglor is still not very good at telling them apart—is sleeping in her arms._

_“A request?” Athair asks, and he_ does _frown. “It is a gift, Nerdanel.”_

_“Feanor. It is a responsibility, and they need not accept it.” That is Mother’s warning tone, and they all hear it—Celegorm when he tries to put his fingers in the jam, Maglor when he whines (he is eight, now, and does not whine so much anymore.)_

_Athair is holding Amras—or is it Amrod? And Amras raises one rose-bud fist to prod at Athair’s chin. Athair looks down at Amras, and he smiles._

_“What is it?” Maedhros asks, very politely. “What do you need, from us?”_

_Mother tucks a wayward curl behind her ear. “We want you to be their godfathers.”_

If Maglor had taken a bullet to the chest, he could have died with Maedhros and Athair holding his hands, and it would have been beautiful, to fade into darkness like that, to leave this horrid land behind. It would have been beautiful, but for the pain.

(Maglor is so afraid of pain.)

“Do you think he is still alive?” he asks.

A man passes them in the hall. Maglor scarcely sees him. Everyone else is a shadow—they came to Rumil’s country, Rumil’s fort, and made it their own, because that is Athair.

That _was_ Athair. His life and his sons were made in his image, and now they know not where to turn.

“I do,” Maedhros says, gritting his teeth. He is standing still, as if indecision takes his legs while a promise drives his mind, and Maglor is torn into no less than twenty pieces, he is sure, but this he can do: slip his arm through Maedhros’s and walk him down the long corridor to their quarters.

 

_Athair sighs, vexed.  “Maglor, sometimes I do not understand you at all.”_

_“I don’t understand_ you _, either!” Maglor shouts, and he is punished for that, but when Athair tucks him into bed that night he kisses him gently on both cheeks and says,_

_“I love you more than all the world, you know.”_

_And Maglor wants, very badly, to know that. He does._

Maedhros rifles through his pack. He has set aside the gun that Athair made—the gun that can fire without reloading, for twelve rounds, light and compact. Now, instead, he holsters his Colt Walker in his belt.

“Where will you go?” Maglor asks.

“He’ll have stayed off the main roads.” Maedhros speaks quickly, quietly. “We taught him well.” Maglor hands him a fresh shirt and he puts it on. Maglor thinks his hands are shaking. “If the orcs let the mail rider live, he’ll likely skip a trading post or two before breaking his journey. I think he’d head south.”

“Back towards Santa Fe?”

“We’re a long way from there. But yes.” Maedhros counts out bullets. “Amrod will try to follow him, but I don’t know if he’ll know where to go. I think he’ll try and find a river.”

“The river is far from here.”

“I know.” The cartridge belt goes on next, and then his coat. “Bury him apart from the rest of Rumil’s graves, Maglor. It’s how he would want it.”

“Bury—”

Maedhros looks at him. There it is again: the set jaw and the dull eyes. “Athair, Maglor. Bury Athair apart from everyone else.”

“But—” Maglor feels terror clawing at his throat. “You’ll be—”

“Gone.” Maedhros swallows. Maybe there is terror in his throat, too. “For at least a few days. Did you not hear me? Amrod does not know where he is going, he is likeliest to make for a river, and the river is miles from here. You have to bury Athair before I return, Maglor. He’s dead. You know as well as I do what will happen to a dead body if—”

Maglor drags his teeth over his lip. “I don’t…”

Maedhros crosses the distance between them. This is all he has—coat, gun, bullets, and the long knife in his boot. His hands are warm on Maglor’s shoulders, though. His hands don’t feel different. Maedhros has often held him before, when Maglor broke down or when Maedhros likely wanted to.

_Athair is dead._

It’s relentless. It’s—it is a thousand things, and most of them are panic.

“You are going to have to be strong, Macalaure,” Maedhros whispers. His lips are trembling, and yes, they are both trembling, and Maedhros’s face is still wet because he _wept_ (they both wept). “You—”

There is a hubbub in the hall. Voices, but this time, Maglor knows them. That is Curufin’s voice.

He and Maedhros run, as if running, and trying, and _finding_ , has brought them any good this day.

 

“Get away!” Curufin is fighting, kicking and scratching, and it takes Maedhros and Celegorm together to drag him back away from the man—a thick-shouldered fellow who swears and mops his scraped neck with a handkerchief.

“Only came to see if he was dead, we’ve a right to know.”

Maedhros _towers_ , all the softness and grief gone. “My _father_ ,” he says, “Is indeed dead, from wounds he bore fighting _your_ enemies. Let my brothers mourn in peace.”

More footsteps, more voices, more men.

_You’ll be—_

_—gone_

Maglor can’t tower. How will Maglor even make it a week, without—

“Feanor is dead,” Maedhros says, when most are assembled. “The master of your fort lies too wounded to wake. We are surrounded by wolves. Who will be your leader now? I would speak to him.”

There is a silence. Curufin sags against Celegorm. His eyes are bright, so brightly shining, that Maglor wonders fleetingly if all the wolves have really been kept at bay.

“You are,” comes a clear voice, and Jem steps forward. Her hands on her hips. Her guns are also on her hips. “Rumil and Feanor both would wish it, and so do I.”

“And I,” agrees Galway, in his thick brogue, and then all of Athair’s men that are left flock around to stand behind Maedhros, so that he does not stand alone.

“Feanor brought us gold,” Jem says, to the members present of Rumil’s company. “He made us new weapons. We’ve been safer than we were, and less afraid. Rumil made his own choices, and we honor them. But who among you has a better claim to leading than Feanor’s son?”

No one argues. A few bow; some mutter. Maglor senses no peace, but also, for the present, no mutiny.

(Mutiny. The desert, and a bullet, and Athair’s gun.)

(It seems like a petty grief, now, and long gone.)

 

“And what of the missing boy?” Homer asks. “Amrod?”

 

Curufin stays with Athair. Who would tear him away? The rest of them are in Rumil’s study, along with Jem and Galway, whom Maedhros deems fit to act as trustworthy representatives from both camps.

 _Of course_ , Maglor thinks. _They stood by him._

(As his brothers will, always. They are all they have.)

“I shall ride out after Amrod,” Maedhros says. “I’ll leave within the hour.” He leans against the desk, his arms folded over his chest, and Maglor knows without hearing it aloud—the secret of the mine dies with Feanor, and with his sons. “The rest of you will give him the funeral he deserves.” His voice hitches on _him_ , but he recovers himself, and he looks neither like Athair nor Mother, but like Grandfather Finwe, on the rare occasion that Maglor saw him acting on the city’s behalf.

“I’ll go with you,” Celegorm offers, the need leaping from him like flame, but Maedhros shakes his head.

“We need a show of strength,” he says. “Here. Feanorians stick together, in the land that Athair found for us.”

Celegorm is needed for a show of strength. Indispensable, even. Maglor swallows _that_ , and finds that it burns. Maybe the flame is his; maybe the fire is not need at all, but betrayal.

Maedhros turns to Caranthir and Amras. “Stay close to them,” he says. ( _Them_. It brings no comfort.) “I won’t be able to send messages, but I will return before the week is out.”  He turns to Jem and Galway. “Thank you. My brothers will need you, too.”

Jem and Galway exchange a glance.  It is a fraction of a second; it is enough. “Not as much as you will,” Jem says.

“Aye.” Galway nods. “We’re coming with you, lad.”

 Maedhros blinks. Some of the dullness fades from his eyes, and Maglor is afraid of what remains behind it.

“I cannot allow it,” Maedhros says, stuttering a little for the first time. “I cannot leave my brothers—”

“There are other friends here,” Galway says. “As you said, it’s only a week. Your brothers won’t be starved or cast out.”

“No, they won’t,” Jem says. “But in the meantime, you’d be a fool to go alone, and you know it.”

Maglor is the second-born. Maglor must see Athair buried. Maglor wants to cry,

 _Why would you not take_ me _?_

It is settled like this: they shall bury Athair on the far side of Rumil’s field. No one but his sons will know that this is in the direction of the mine. They will bury Athair and wait for Maedhros and the others to bring Amrod home.

“No fighting,” Maedhros orders. “Among yourselves, or with the rest of the fort.”

This is after he has asked Galway and Jem to step outside, that he might speak to his brothers privately.

Maglor crushes his fingers against his palms.

“You can take Huan,” Celegorm offers. He gnaws at his knuckles; he is nervous, and trying to appear not so. “He could help you—hunt. Search.”

“I would not part him from you,” Maedhros says. He smiles when he says that. It is a tired, painted-on smile, but a smile all the same.

(Athair is dead.)

There is a man talking with Galway and Jem in the hall when they reemerge. Maglor recognizes him by his thick brows and dark beard.

“He’ll manage our company,” Jem says. “It’s all a matter of protecting the gates and perimeter, and soothing ruffled tempers. He’ll make sure no one causes trouble.”

Celegorm is obviously straining to ask what right tempers have to be ruffled, but he holds it back, for now. Maglor wonders how long that will last.

Maglor wonders why it is a question at all.

Athair did not bring the railroad west, but he brought fuel to a smoldering fire, and made free with it.

 

Now, they all burn.

 

To the dark-browed man, Maedhros says, “Thank you, Ulfang,” because Maedhros is good at remembering names.

 

“Maglor,” Maedhros says, when it is just the two of them again. “I am sorry.”

“It’s Maglor now, is it?” They are standing outside the door of the fort. Maedhros has Alexander saddled beside him. Jem and Galway are busy fetching their own mounts. “Not Macalaure? You don’t need to convince me of anything now, do you?”

Maedhros drops the reins—Alexander is trained, and stays where he is—and the next moment Maglor is caught in his brother’s arms, and Maedhros presses his forehead against Maglor’s shoulder, and he has to stoop to do it, for Maglor is shorter than he is, and—

Maglor struggles until he lets go.

“You don’t even trust me.” He feels like he is tearing off his own skin, peeling it back and _pulling_. It hurts that much. “You a-asked _Celegorm_ , and—”

 

 _Maedhros stepped into the room where Athair lay once more. His face lost_ everything _, all resolve, and pride, and color. Curufin was kneeling close by the bedside, with Athair’s limp fingers in his._

_Maglor stood by the door and watched._

_“Curufin,” Maedhros said, “I am leaving.”_

_Curufin did not answer._

_“I am going to find Amrod.”_

_“He is dead,” Curufin said, looking at Maedhros, and then at Maglor, so that Maglor wanted to flinch away. Curufin’s voice was almost mocking. “He is dead, and you know it, and I know it. And Athair knew it too.”_

_“Maglor will need you,” Maedhros kept on, somehow stolid. “While I am away.”_

_Curufin said nothing more._

_And so Maedhros stood for a long moment, with his spurs dragging on the floor behind him, and he looked at Athair’s face like he would never see it again._

He won’t _, Maglor realized._ He won’t ever see it again, not even for another hour. Not even if we left him here all night.

_Slowly, Maedhros carded his hand—right hand, gun hand, hand that Athair trained to perfect aim—through Athair’s hair._

_If he whispered a goodbye, Maglor did not hear it._

 

“Maglor,” Maedhros says, “I asked Celegorm to help, so that he would not follow me. I asked Curufin to help, so that he would not tear himself apart with grief. But they are children, and they are going to be afraid. That is why I asked _you_ to stay strong, because you will be the eldest in my stead, and they will _need you_.”

 _But I,_ Maglor wants to shout, to scrape, to bury deep inside his brother’s chest, _need_ you _._

“Go, then,” he says bitterly. The sun is almost halfway up its morning climb. “Save what Athair could not.”

 

When Maedhros is gone—before Maedhros is gone, because Maglor can still see the shapes of horses through the storms of dust—

Maglor is sorry.

He bites his tongue and bites his nails and swears to never let sorrow make him quick in twisted anger again.

 

They bury Athair the next day, under golden sunshine, in the field that runs above the veins of the diamond tunnel.

It does not feel like the funeral he deserves.


	7. Maedhros

In the distance, the mountains are the color of dried blood. Maedhros is left to wonder—if he dares—why the noon sun feels no different now than it did a day ago. 

Not twenty-four hours past, his life was— 

 _Hateful_ , he would have answered, if truth ever belonged to him. _A hateful, ruined life._  

He would have been quite wrong. 

A year has come and gone since his last return to Formenos. He remembers the day Fingolfin’s carriage arrived. That blue-and-silver livery marked, very simply, the turning of time and the opening of secrets. 

With no right, and despite much loss, he had nonetheless been happy before that day. Even worse, he was happier after. All the goodbyes had tasted more sweet than bitter; all of them were right, and few were intended to be forever. 

 _(Do not think of_ _Fingon_ _.)_  

 _“Go where?”_ Mother asked, desperately, when she learned of Athair’s plan—and Maedhros felt guilt (hardly a new sensation) at his part in that early lie. 

He told himself, then, that it was a lie of omission. Perhaps it was, and now omission has come to reap its reward. 

For this is the truth of a hateful life—it is still a _life_. 

Life is a bargain. Death is not. 

  

“Maedhros!” Jem barks, from a dozen strides behind. “We should make camp.” 

He doesn’t want to make camp. He doesn’t want to stop, even to let the horses rest, though they have been riding for nearly twelve hours. It was bright morning when they set out, and they have long since finished retracing what they know of Amrod’s trail. Now night sets in, cursed with all the remembrance of the one gone before it, and they have found nothing.  

Nothing, on their way to the river. Nothing, in the wide and rolling fields.  

He halts, reluctantly, and Jem trots up beside him, her hat cast-off and swinging against her back. 

“We’re in an endless territory,” she points out. “Mountains and forest one way, desert another. You know your brother best, but you’re going to have to _think_ , if you’re to do him any good.” 

“She’s right,” Galway rumbles, drawing abreast. “He's got a few hours’ start on us, but he's only a boy. If you rest, you’ll have the wits to track him better.” 

Maedhros’s instincts, if not his will, agree. He dismounts. There is an oozing morass of anguished thought swimming just below the surface of his awareness, but he turns his attention to counting the strokes of his heartbeat, to leading Alexander under the cover of sycamores. His hands are shaking badly, without the rhythm of a gallop to distract him. 

He needs a drink. He hasn’t had a drink since—is it two nights, now? He needs a bottle of whiskey and a stupor, if not sleep. 

He can have neither. 

  

 _Disgusting habit, Mother always calls it._ _Athair_ _has no need for the bottle; his mind would spurn the help or the harm of an alien substance. It is only_ _Maedhros_ _, crawling coward that he is, who drags down whatever spirits he can, all in the hopes of thinking himself somewhere—or_ someone _—else._  

  

Jem and Galway are respectfully quiet as they unpack apples and bread and dried, jerked beef for a cold supper. Maedhros had not even thought to bring food, in his haste. He had not even thought to carry a waterskin. In the rush of running, he cared only for weapons. Does not that alone mark him as Athair’s— 

The edges of his vision seem to grey. He sways on his feet. There is a cliff, and there is the leap from the cliff, and both eventualities seem to have taken up abstract residence beneath his ribs.  

“Sit here, lad,” Galway says, gruff and kind. “How you manage the strength for anything, thin as you are, is beyond me. Eat a little.” 

Obediently, Maedhros chokes down a few twists of jerky. His stomach protests, and he has to cover his mouth to force himself to swallow. At least Maglor is not beside him, watching with bright, worried eyes. Maglor is alone and eldest, likely sobbing into his hands at every opportunity, almost certainly doing so in front of their brothers and the company of Mithrim both.  

Maglor has no concept of a _strong front._  

 _Do you?_ mocks a cold voice in his mind, and Maedhros is too weary to argue with it. 

  

(Maedhros has always known that someday, his father would die.) 

(The knowledge always stopped his heart and blinded his eyes, and he pushed it away as quickly as he could.) 

  

The horses snuffle softly. The night is very dark, and one feels how absolute such darkness is, when there are no stars, no moon. These are hours for secrecy, for deeds unrecoverable, and somewhere in this darkness, Amrod is all alone.  

 _Is, is, is_ . Athair has become a stiff and empty body, but Amrod lives in Maedhros’s mind, and _will_ live, until Maedhros sees his stiff and empty body, too. 

“You should sleep,” Jem whispers. “I’ll keep watch.” 

“I can’t,” Maedhros answers dully. If he sleeps, Athair will be alive again. 

“If you won’t do it for yourself, you should do it for your brother.” In the pause that follows, she seems to be considering something. Then, gingerly, Jem moves a little closer to him. They have no fire, since the light and smoke might draw Mairon’s yellow eyes, but Galway lies nearby, snoring.  

Jem coughs, and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “Here,” she says. She has no womanly charms at all, and Maedhros is thankful for that. “If it will help.” 

It should shame him, that a stranger whose acquaintance he has not yet held for six months has been able to detect how much he craves the comfort of touch and affection. If Maedhros himself were as strong as his grief, he would refuse, remembering how Athair once offered him the same.   

(Maedhros is, and always will be, weak.) 

He lowers his head to her shoulder. Just that—the _warmth,_ the faint throb of her pulse, and he is able to imagine away the world. He feels the corded tension in his throat ease. His head still aches and his mouth is still dry, but he shuts his eyes. 

  

(Mother and Fingon and Finrod, even Uncle Fingolfin—they are all back east, hearing nothing, receiving and sending no word, and so to _them_ Athair still walks and breathes and _burns_ … 

 _Or maybe to them, you are all already dead._ ) 

  

In the morning, they do not find Amrod.  

  

“If he knew he was being hunted,” Maedhros reasons, “He would hide.” 

 _If he did not know he was being hunted, that makes him only prey._  

“Where would he hide?” 

“Near a water source.” Maedhros runs a hand through his hair, tangled by relentless wind. His hands are shaking, have not _stopped_ shaking, but at least that does not matter while they ride. “So the river is still our best gamble. I do not think, though, that he would try to ford it.” 

“Unless…” Jem frowns. “Unless he is forced to.” 

Mairon, all pale hair and pale teeth and flaming eyes, has not been far from Maedhros’s thoughts even when the loss of Athair seems fit to overwhelm him.  

( _Where am I going?_ ) 

(Oh, to be able to fall to his knees and never rise, to sink beneath the kind weight of too much drink and never rise, to lay beside his father’s body and never—) 

“We should scour the western banks,” Maedhros concludes. “We cannot divide our party without sending one alone, and I think that unwise. My brother will be on his guard, wherever he is. We may need to make our presence known without making that which we seek known, on the chance that Mairon does not show himself to us immediately. I do not want to lead him, or anyone else, to my brother.” 

“Mairon seems like the kind to ambush,” Galway mutters.  

Jem nods, her face set. 

  

They spend two days like this. On the third day, with no sign of Amrod, there is a cloud of dust visible, some miles in the distance, across the river-carved valley. 

“Riders,” Jem says. “On the road.” 

“A small company, I think.” Maedhros _thinks_ , these days, only to decide their next move. He eats for Amrod, and sleeps for Amrod, and if Jem and Galway are aware that the man they chose as their leader is little more than an ill-strung puppet, trembling with liquor-lust and fleeing from grief, they do not say so.  

“Orcs?” Galway wonders, brow furrowing. 

“Perhaps.” He blinks hard, to quell the muzziness in his head. “My—brothers and I killed a number of them.” 

“That’s an understatement,” Jem says crisply. “But it’s also a far leap to imagine that they’re out searching for us or him. No one knows where you are, and I doubt they would care about Amrod. He’s too young to hold accountable.” 

“Perhaps they ride to Mithrim,” Maedhros says. “Knowing that my father is—” 

He stops. They stop, too, and there is a long moment where Maedhros cannot breathe. He doubles over, hands gripping knees, and there it is, there is the scene painted vividly once more, when Maedhros held his fire and Gothmog did not, when Athair stood tall and proud and— 

A bullet can kill any man, and Athair was a man, and Athair is dead because he didn’t believe he had to be.  

Athair is dead and Maedhros is here and Maedhros never wanted to believe that a world such as this would carry the day, or that he would have a place in it.  

( _Where am I going?_ Athair asked, at the end. When had he ever asked a question he had not the time to answer?) 

( _He has answered it now_ , Maedhros thinks. _For better or for worse—or perhaps for neither. Perhaps we were all wrong, even_ _Athair_ _, and his soul has passed too, into…nothingness._ )   

“No matter,” Jem is saying, somewhere far away. “We’ll keep low, if they come any nearer, and stay sharp.” 

 

(Another day goes by like this.) 

 

Then comes a red-clouded morning. 

Galway sucks his teeth and says, forebodingly, “Sailors take warning.” 

“We’re not sailors,” Jem scoffs. 

He shrugs. “All the same. There’s a storm coming.” 

They have covered thirty miles of careful searching along the river, and by noon, they count five more. 

But for traces of mule deer and grouse, there have been no other track patterns. Now, though, Maedhros tugs at his reins, stilling Alexander mid-step. 

“Hoof-prints,” he calls, and hope sparks in his death-caverned chest for the first time in days. 

 

(If he brings Amrod home, he will not let any of them—not even Curufin—guilt him for Athair. No one should have to bear that but the man who killed him; or at least, _Amrod_ should not have to bear it. If any of Feanor’s sons were intended to protect their father, surely it was his eldest.) 

 

(If he closes his eyes, Athair will still be alive.) 

 

The prints fell on soft ground, but they are not quite fresh. “A day old, I would guess,” Maedhros says. He wishes he had Celegorm’s insight. Celegorm and Huan would be an immeasurable help, but he cannot be sorry that he left them safely behind.  

“This is very good news.” Galway beams warmly. “For if these tracks are your brother’s, that means that yesterday, he was alive.” 

“Well, then.” Jem saunters forward. She is not exactly smiling, but her eyes are bright. “Perk up, coppertop.” 

 

The trees that line the steep bank begin to thin, replaced by tall, waving grasses. The bank itself deepens, gnawing out a ravine.  

On the wind, they hear voices.  

 

“Not as close as they seem,” Galway mutters. Still, they have stopped and dismounted. “You two wait here. I’ll go ahead and scout out if we’re like to run across a band of traders, or something less savory.”  

Maedhros nods. A gust of wind, whipping his hair against his face, is not enough to mask the crack of thunder. “Go on,” he says. “And be careful.” 

The arrow bursts Jem’s eye like a berry. She’s dead before she hits the ground. 

(A crossbow bolt, Maedhros recognizes. Athair trained them in the use of every kind of projectile, though that does nothing to help him now.) 

From the shivering grass, smooth and silent, Mairon rises. His furs bristle over his shoulders, and the sick storm-light glints on the knife in his left hand. The bow—a cruel, compact thing, he clasps in his right. 

Jem fell close to Maedhros. The upturned toe of her boot is ten inches from his.  

Galway is shouting, curses and cries of grief, and Maedhros has no time, no time at all to wonder if there was more between Galway and Jem than mere grudging alliance. Mairon raises his weapon again but Maedhros draws quicker, and Mairon throws himself aside to escape the bullet’s path.  

“Run!” Maedhros commands. “Keep searching. I’ll take him.” 

Galway swipes at his brow and his flooded eyes, and he runs. 

Mairon cocks his head and smiles, seemingly unconcerned with Galway’s departure. “Will you,” he asks, soft as spider-silk, “Take me?” 

Cold water slips down Maedhros’s forehead. It is beginning to rain. 

He fires again. Pointblank range, but his hand is shaking. His goddamn hands are shaking. Mairon dodges easily; the shot went far astray. 

Jem is still warm and bleeding on the ground, and Maedhros _needs a drink._ That is how he dishonors her: she died for him, for following him, and he can’t even shoot straight because he chained himself to a sorry sinner’s need. 

He holsters his gun, and slips the knife from his boot. 

Mairon’s eyes glint, and he smiles, a curtain of flesh drawn lightly back from even-edged fangs.  

The thunder rolls and the rain falls and Maedhros closes the distance between them, the distance between Jem’s life and the fiend who took it. 

Mairon’s knife slashes at the thick leather covering his shoulder. Maedhros stabs, and the blow is barely parried. Up close, the man smells of dead things and their musk. His hair is no darker when wet; his eyes are no more human. 

“All alone?” Mairon rasps, licking the rain from his lips. “Have the rest of your brothers abandoned the search?” 

Maedhros has a thousand slights ready on his tongue, but he knows to save his breath. It is all he can do to anticipate the striking blade in time enough to block it, to return with the best attacks he can. 

 _Better aim for throat or the belly,_ Athair always said, _if you only have a knife._ Here, the great mass of furs makes it difficult to score a clean thrust, even though Mairon seems unhindered by their weight. 

“He will not survive.” 

Maedhros grinds his teeth, his head snapping back as the tip of Mairon’s blade whistles past his nose.  

“Your brother,” Mairon hisses, as if Maedhros had not guessed. “I’ve been following him for days. He weaves back and forth, river and field, forest and road, yet he and his horse are nigh exhausted. I do not tire. I will find him, when I have your guts looped around my belt and your scalp woven into my pelts.” 

 _Amrod_ _._ _Amrod_ _is alive._  

Maedhros lets out a cry at last, a war-cry, and springs at Mairon as if they have no knives at all. He feels the blade sting where it bites his arm, but far more keenly does he feel the man fall beneath him, shoulders and hips squelching into the viscous mud that sucks against their boots. 

Mairon grunts in surprise, but Maedhros knocks the knife from his hand and pins his wrists, forcing his full weight down against him.  

“Then he has eluded you,” Maedhros spits. “A _child_ , keeping out of reach for days, and you so great a hunter. Let it be known, as you squirm here in the mud—my brothers and I are more than you will ever be.” 

(Somewhere, Athair might be proud.) 

Mairon gnashes his teeth, shaking away the drops that spill over his dirt-streaked cheeks. “I’ll skin you for that.” 

“How will you manage it from beyond the grave?” Maedhros demands. 

In the blur of this, in the blur of Amrod’s hope and Athair’s honor, Maedhros heard no hoofbeats. 

“My apologies,” comes Gothmog’s blunt-edged southern drawl. “For interrupting.” 

Maedhros turns his head to look. There are a dozen men. No—one more than that. Dangling by one arm from Gothmog’s saddle is Galway’s headless body. 

(There is no time.) 

Maedhros forces his elbow down on Mairon’s left arm, scrabbling for a better hold on his knife, that he might drive it deep between the meeting of the man’s neck and shoulder. 

It is too late. Mairon is strong, and swift, and he writhes violently so that Maedhros loses the purchase of elbow to arm. And now Marion has a hand free, and he claws at Maedhros’s face, and Maedhros shies away. 

Gothmog has dismounted. Gothmog strides forward, and clubs the butt of his whip against the back of Maedhros’s head. 

 

(If he sleeps, Athair will be alive again. 

 _You thought_ , Athair asks, _that I would be proud?_ ) 

 

Maedhros wakes to a sharper headache than the one he has had all week. His arms ache, too, as they are being drawn painfully tight behind him— 

His hands are being bound. Maedhros lurches and fights, and hears again that hateful voice, the voice of Athair’s murderer. 

“Oh, you intend to be trouble,” Gothmog muses, and it must be he who is doing the binding, for the next moment a massive hand forces Maedhros’s face into the mud. 

He chokes and sputters, drowning in the slimy silt, and then he can breathe again, but his hands and ankles are cinched tight and linked together. He is helpless. 

He—is not dead. Galway and Jem are dead, but Maedhros is— 

Gothmog turns him over with a forceful shove of boot against chest, and now Maedhros is the one squinting with raw eyes in the rain, trying to meet his captor’s gaze. 

“Murderer,” he shouts, hacking, and Gothmog chuckles, tipping the brim of his hat so that water runs from it like a trough. 

“All this on your old man’s behalf?” he asks. “I imagine that’s what you’d like to have me believe, with your friends dead and you hog-tied and belly-up. ‘Fraid I know the real reason you’re out here.” 

“Let me at him!” Mairon’s voice slices as keenly as his bowie. “He’s mine, overseer. _Mine_.” 

“Keep your hair on,” Gothmog says, unruffled. “He not yours anymore.” 

Mairon snarls, and slits the throat of the man beside him. 

There is an uproar. It is brief—guns are drawn, though they will not all be much good in the rain, and Mairon _howls_ as the body slumps at his feet. 

“That's enough!” Gothmog bellows. “Bauglir will have this brat delivered in one piece. Take your grievance up with him,you bastard—I’ll not hold with mutiny.” 

 _You killed him_ , Maedhros rages inwardly, and even the sullen sky seems to whiten with blazing fury. _You killed Athair._  

And Maedhros failed him, then and now. 

Mairon drags his knife across his thigh and sheathes it. Then he stalks away. At a motion from Gothmog, none of the men follow. Mairon stops a dozen paces from them; his back is turned, but the rain is passing and Maedhros can see that his shoulders are shaking. Grief and mirth are both unimaginable; this is something else. 

He cannot consider it further: Gothmog hauls him to his knees. 

“Now then,” he muses. “What to do with you?” 

Maedhros’s throat still feels clogged with mud, so he does not speak—he spits. 

Gothmog is maddeningly unoffended. 

He wipes his face with his sleeve and then drags the cuff over Maedhros’s cheeks, cleaning away the worst of the filth. 

“I declare,” Gothmog chuckles. “You’re as pretty as a woman. If you was one, I might let you go.” 

“I’ll kill you,” Maedhros grits out. So much for saving his breath. “I’ll kill you for what you did to him.” 

“Your father ain’t got no one but himself to blame. He walked into our territory because he thought he was too special to kill.” 

Maedhros swallows down a sob and is silent. 

“I wasn't even looking for your little brother,” Gothmog adds, almost as an aside. “And now he’s dead too.” 

Maedhros's heart leaps to his throat. 

“You don't believe me? I’ll show you.” Gothmog nods to one of his men, little more than a roll of his thick neck. “Cut his ankles, and leash him.” 

More rope is noosed around Maedhros’s neck, but at least he can walk. He does not want to follow, but he knows that Gothmog is strong enough to drag him. 

Gothmog, who sunk a bullet in Athair's chest. 

Maedhros follows. 

 

All the while, all the way away from Jem’s body and Galway’s body, Gothmog talks. The rope-ends are wound around his stone-rough hands, and he jerks at them a bit to remind Maedhros that he can make him stumble. 

“We flushed him out,” Gothmog says. “Running from slinker, no doubt. When the rain came down the mountains, he veered too close. It’s a devil of a fall.” 

On the edge of the precipice, there is a swath of scraped and crumbled ground. Closer, Gothmog forces him. Closer. The wet soil slides beneath their boots. 

Below, the broken body of a horse. 

Below, the spilled and swollen remnants of a supply pack tangled in the branches of a fallen tree. 

Below, the river rushing white. 

In another moment, Maedhros cannot see the river for his tears. 

“His body,” he says stubbornly, his voice thick. “There’s no body.” 

“He was a puny little runt,” Gothmog says. “Soon swept away—but I swear on your God and mine, I saw him fall.” Then Gothmog’s hand closes around the knot of the leash, and he drags Maedhros’s face forward until it is only inches from his tobacco-stained teeth and foul breath. “Think of it as mercy, boy. It was a quick death. Better than I can say for you.” 


End file.
